The best laid plans always involve spending a lot at Target first

For lunch, I have had several pretzel crisps and some trail mix, a rolled up slice of ham inside a rolled-up slice of cheese, some of yesterday's roasted cauliflower straight out of the fridge (and very delicious it was too) and a cup of tea. That hits all the major food groups, even if it isn't very pretty.

What happened was, I spent an hour at Target picking up bits and pieces for our upcoming Very Busy November: new towels because we'll be having a guest, snacks and notebooks for the kids for our road trip to NYC this weekend, last-minute birthday presents for her highness, who just happens to be turning three in Two! Days!, a loaf of bread and a pair of cosy pyjama bottoms for me because they were there and I need cosy pyjama bottoms. I didn't even find the storage bins I was looking for. (They can't be wicker, becuase B hates wicker with the passion of a thousand firey suns. I believe he averts his eyes every time the laundry hamper comes into view. And they need to be smaller than the canvas ones they sell in Target, because those are just a tiny bit too tall for my purposes.)

Then I rushed back to pick up Mabel from school in the nick of time, running into a set of roadworks on the way to slow me down, of course - I imagined myself being pulled over for speeding once the road was clear again (not that I was speeding, Dear, of course) and whether I would get into even more trouble if the first thing I did, rather than reaching submissively for the registration details in the glove compartment, was to grab my phone and dial a friend to go and retrieve Mabel from the playground in time; luckily, no such thing came to pass, but it was a close run thing - but Wednesday is the day we usually take lunch to the playground with a group of friends, and I hadn't brought lunch. So I rummaged in the Target bag and realised that I could purloin some of the road-trip snacks, and we took juice boxes, pretzel chips and trail mix along the wooded path to the picnic tables.

Five minutes later, Mabel said she wanted to go home. So home we came. She's now asleep and has spent enough time coughing without waking up that I'm convinced she's about to come down with some horrible lurgy just in time to (a) make her birthday miserable and (b) stop us from going to New York.

Here's hoping not. I have new crayons, new notebooks, and a couple of those invisible-ink colouring pads for the kids for the journey. What do you bring to keep your children happy on a road trip? Also, any tips for things we should definitely do in New York on Saturday - assuming we get there? The weather should be pretty nice. Fingers crossed.