Goings-on ongoing

Once again, this morning, I didn't go for a run.

One way or another, the fates have conspired against me for the past week, and between weather, and days off school, and weather, and my period, I haven't had a chance to go out for ages. I hate this - not because I'm a runner, all champing at the bit for activity and pacing up and down like a caged tiger; but because it makes me afraid that I'll never get back out there and my tiny bit of motivation will desert me and I'll be back to being a blob who wasted money on good shoes for nothing.

On the other hand, it's novel, if irritating, for me to actually want to exercise and be prevented by outside influences. I'm almost completely certain I'm not just using them as excuses. And B has been very good about not bugging me, because he knows that the one thing certain to make me not go is someone telling me that I should. (Mabel? My daughter? What? I see no correlation here.)

I have gone to the not-aerobics class for the past two Saturdays, even last week when there was fresh snow on the ground (all of half an inch) and only the die-hards were there (and me), so all isn't entirely lost. I can do a sexy march with the best of them. (No. No, I can't. But I'm learning.)

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The wearing of the underwear was going really well until I bragged about it to a friend, whereupon Mabel immediately went through two pairs of trousers, peed on the aforementioned ice, and is now wearing a pullup. I suppose we'll get back on the horse soon, but I'm not talking about it. If you see me start to talk about it, put your fingers in your ears and sing la la laaa at the top of your voice.

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Yesterday, in a fit of something or other, I bought a bag of mini croissants. (This is what happens when I go to a different supermarket. All sorts of odd things seem perfectly reasonable purchases.) Dash was excited but wished they were chocolate croissants, and I said we could probably do something about that. So when we got home I cunningly sliced along the top of one, put in a few chocolate chips, and heated it for five seconds in the microwave. He was quite pleased.

Today, somehow, there are two...one...oh, look at that, the mini croissants are all gone. Mabel just asked for the last one, let me put three chocolate chips carefully in it, and said she didn't need it heated up. Then she fished the chips out again, sucked each one into happy oblivion, and told me I could eat the croissant.

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Dash came home today with a big picture of a penguin captioned in his writing with "My penguin and I like to fly." His teacher had stuck on a post-it in response to my e-mail of this morning, saying that the children had used their IMAGINATIONS to think of something they would like to do with their penguins. (Hmm. That sounds dodgy. She didn't put it quite like that.) Dash has recanted his earlier statement about there definitely being a flying species of penguin and now says the movie they watched was a cartoon. I'm still a bit confused, but I think we can be confident that his teacher was not using BBC April fools jokes as source material, and that you can't always take what a five-year-old says at face value.

No news there, then.