Raindrops keep falling on my daydreams

Mabel is very much enjoying this song these days. It may have taken over from One Dozen Monkeys, at least for a while. I think it's hilarious that my budding grammar maven insists on expanding "you'll" to "you will", with no care for scansion.

I think she's really going to get into the Christmas spirit in a week or two. Yesterday she ran up to me:
"Mummy, sing 'Redolf, the rud...', 'Redulf the rod...' ... sing the song about the reindeer."

The thing she's messing with in the video is one of those devices for hooking bikes on the back of a car. Sadly, no longer much use to us as B left his bike out front one too many times and it disappeared. So the frame thing came into the house, and Mabel found it this morning and decided it was her pilates machine. She's doing exercises on it while she sings, you'll notice.

The kids are mostly mystified by what pilates is, I realise. It's just this mystical place I disappear to on Wednesday evenings (sometimes), and I'd love to know what their little minds envision when they think of it. Earlier in the week I had brought my pilates mat into the house, and they unrolled it and gave themselves a pilates class. "This is a very difficult pilate," Dash advised Mabel, as he contorted himself in to some sort of pushup on the mat.

Which brings me to my other traffic-stopping revelation for the day: it's much nicer to think about exercising than to actually do it. I was happy with my new decision to start running (walking briskly in expensive clothes, whatever), and it was lovely to think about how nice it will (firmly using the future tense, none of these hypotheticals for me) be when I am fit. But B was almost unseemly in his enthusiasm, and made sure to bring me to the running shop this morning to buy some good shoes. "There's no rush," I assured him, but off we went anyway.

The man in the shop asked me how much running I was doing, when I said we'd come to get me some shoes. "Well, none, yet." Really, who buys shoes after they've started running? Isn't the right thing to do to get the shoes first? He found me some shoes in my size with a "neutral" gait, to see how I looked on the treadmill.

"You're familiar with running on a treadmill, right?"
"Um, no. No, I don't think I've ever been on one, really." I did use the elliptical machine a few times when we lived in Texas and had a tiny gym attached to our apartment complex, but I steered clear of the treadmill. It just didn't look very interesting.
"Okay. I'll set it to a walking pace. Probably somewhere between three and four miles an hour for you."
We settled on 2.9, because I was in danger of falling off the back.

He pointed out the various wierdnesses of my gait, and I mentioned my vertiginous arches, and he came back with a new pair of shoes that felt bouncy and snug. I was sent for a little run outside and assured that the people around here were used to seeing people who didn't look as if they should be exerting themselves running around the square. Once around the plaza was just about as far as I'm able to run, it turned out, so I looked perfectly reasonable until I reached the doors and flopped myself back in, a tad out of breath. We had a little conversation about how people who are aerobically fit when they start running are prone to injury because they push themselves harder than their bones and muscles can cope with at first. I agreed that I would probably not have that problem.

Then, the piece de restistance: I needed a decent sports bra. The ones I wear for pilates are from before I had babies, which makes them at least six years old, and not exactly the right size in several directions, besides being not nearly sturdy enough for running purposes. I tried on a few, and, as I had feared, had to accept that the best one for me was the most ugly, most industrial strength model there. I may look a little too well-upholstered for comfort, but damnit if I won't bounce. At least, some parts of me might be bouncing - let's charitably say my feet, in their new shoes - but my boobs will be bound tightly to my chest in perfect, immobile squishedness.

As we left the shop, I told B that he can wrap it all up and put it under the tree, because of course I'm not going to use any of this stuff yet. That would take all the enjoyment out of my daydreaming.