I Went Out For Breakfast On Thanksgiving With My Two Kids

Jessica Delfino
4 min readNov 24, 2022

a photo from a Thanksgiving several years ago

My husband woke me up this morning and said, “Can you take the family out for breakfast so I can cook our day’s feast without a big breakfast mess in the way?”

I groggily nodded and pulled myself up out of the bed, slapping on some elastic-waisted pants and a purple speckled nursing shirt. You know, a nursing shirt. It has a slice in the middle so you can easily yank your boobs out at the dinner table or wherever need be and provide life sustaining fluids to a baby. I have about 4 of them in various colors and a love/hate relationship with most of them.

But wait — it’s Thanksgiving morning, I reminded us both. What will be open today? “Everything!” he promised.

I Googled and called about 8 different restaurants of lessening seniority until I scraped the barrel, so to speak, landing on a local pancake emporium that I generally tried to avoid. It’s not that it’s bad, per se, but they don’t have the kind of syrup I like (maple; what can I say? I grew up in Maine) and I suspect they use powdered eggs. They typically do have acceptable hot decaf though, so that’s a bonus — said beverage is, for some reason, not always easy to find. Of course, they were open.

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Jessica Delfino

I write about life with 1 husband, 2 kids, 1 cat, sometimes funny. Instagram.com/JessicaDelfino Bylines: TheNew Yorker, The NY Times, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s.