Cereal and Aerobics - Nestle Fitness week in our household

We’ve been trying to move away from cereal in the mornings, because it’s a quite pricy breakfast in combination with milk, which is expensive here. One bottle of milk costs 2750 LE, and one pack of Cheerios/Golden Grahams/Special K/Nestle Fitness costs around 6000 LE. (3000 LE is $2) If all of us eat cereal every morning, we’ll go through 3 packs/week, and one bottle of milk/morning. That’s about $26/week just for cereal, which isn’t really a complete breakfast anyways, because without the protein, the boys will ask for something to eat within an hour after we’ve started school. This is where our major fruit consumption comes in. Kilos of grapefruits and bananas keep everyone going until lunch.

The upside with cereal though, as opposed to oatmeal, pancakes or scrambled eggs, is that I don’t have to cook anything, and it accumulates very little dishes. The boys can feed themselves breakfast and then put their bowls in the dishwasher. Because I already cook both lunch and dinner later in the day, I really don’t want to have to cook breakfast as well.

However, desperate times calls for desperate measures, so we decided to not buy cereal any more. Until earlier this week, when we noticed there was a special on Nestle Fitness and that you get a free workout video with your pack of cereal. So we bought two packs with two different workouts, which we – all of us - now have been doing every day for a week. It felt kind of silly at first, doing aerobics in our living room, but the boys seem to enjoy it, and I feel like I’m getting some much wanted exercise time in, without having to go anywhere or do anything (usually it’s a bit of a hassle, because it takes a while to get to the sports center and I don’t really know what to do with the kids anyways, etc.). Abraham even joins in, puts his arms up, jumps, and laughs through the whole program. The lady – Rachel Something – is a bit annoying, but aren’t aerobics instructors supposed to be? In any case, I’m trying to think of this round of cereal as not just a way of feeding our family, but as an investment in our health. And when the cereal runs out in a few days, we’ll still have the workout DVDs.