When I was a little kid, I had a lot of great ideas. I think everyone does. Sometimes we’d get to see these ideas come full circle, and learn a valuable lesson. Like why you don’t swing from chandeliers, or why you aren’t supposed to convert an old refrigerator into a ‘fort.’ Most of the time, however, these ideas had to stay in our heads, because our (evil) parents wouldn’t let us try them out.

But one of the good things about growing up is you get to try some of these crazy ideas out. Especially if you kept them all in a notebook, like me.

I was never allowed to eat sugary cereals as a kid. In retrospect I don’t really resent it because that’s probably why I don’t need medicine to focus, but at the time I thought it was total bullsh*t. Whenever I was at a friend’s I would sample all the different sugary cereals like I was some desperate 11 year old Shaker who didn’t understand electricity. One vivid memory is when I first got to try Cookie Crisp. It was disgusting. It tasted like Sand Dollar Crisp. I was so disappointed. The ad promised cookies for breakfast! That dog!

Speaking of cookies, one of my favorite types when I was little was Teddy Grahams. I loved these because you could eat handfuls of them and that felt great. Of course I’d never have access to the entire box, so I’d usually be eatin’ my grahams out of a plastic baggy at lunch time. Well, one such lunchtime I was thinking about my cereal experience while nibblin’ on some grahams and couldn’t figure out why a company didn’t make a cereal that did taste like cookies. It seemed so easy…just pour cookies into milk. Just then, it hit me. Teddy Graham Cereal. Booya. Read More »

One of my favorite things to do during the weekend at college was stumble down to the dining hall after a night of partying and fill a cereal bowl with about 8 different kinds of cereal.

Through blurry vision and a pounding head, I would reach for one “good-for-you” brand (for the base), and then proceed to find every sweet option available, filling my bowl to the brim with enough chemically altered sugar to keep me hopping for hours.

You see, when I was younger, my mom never let us have sweet cereal. We’d go with her to the grocery store, beg and plead for something with a cartoon character on it, and she’d simply shake her head, reach for the raisin bran, and state, “filling your mouth with sugar first thing in the morning means the dentist is going to have to pull your teeth.”

She could scare us for a little while, but once I grew up and realized eating sugary cereal doesn’t really dictate how many cavities you get drilled (I was the healthiest kid alive and still had about 3 of them), I vowed to find my way back the bobble-headed cartoons of my youth and their bounty of sweet.

So now, for your consideration, I present the Top 5 Sugary Cereals Of All Time (or at least my childhood):

Reeses’s Puffs: Even though it tasted nothing like the candy, this cereal was still the shit. Chocolate and peanut butter? With milk?! ALL IN ONE BOWL??! Who cared that the balls were hard and scratched up the top part of your mouth? Who cared that they got stale in a day? You were basically eating candy!!! For breakfast!!! Read More »