No muffins

Mabel is at a playdate across the road, and I have an extra hour and a half to mess around with this morning. Except for the part where I had to go down to school to get her anyway, find that she'd re-changed her mind (it's her prerogative) about going home with her friend, install her carseat into my friend's car even though she had a perfectly good brand-new one there for Mabel to use, and kiss her goodbye. Then we both drove back up the hill home and got out of our cars on either side of the road. She unloaded three happy children into her house, and I unloaded nobody at all into mine.

Tomorrow, I'll return the favor, but hopefully with 100% less redundant driving around, since Mabel's friend fits perfectly in Dash's (otherwise empty on this trip) carseat and is not nearly as fussy as she is.

Meanwhile, I'm slowly trying to use my free time - now that my "two children, two schools, five mornings" fantasy is actually coming true - to impose some sort of order on this place and my mentality. There's a very gradual hint of meal planning, winter-clothes sorting, and even house-cleaning starting to make its way into the way things are being done. I've even gone running again and started back at my old pilates class.

Which is just as well, because sorting winter clothes has led me to discover that I have far more pairs of jeans than anyone needs, and that too many of them are too small, because I seem to be taking up more space than I was at the start of the summer. Since Mabel is now nursing a lot less and I didn't exercise when the weather was warm - so much for those good intentions - this is not rocket science, but it's still disappointing. I'll probably never again be as skinny as I was when I had an 18-month-old nursing every five minutes (or so it seemed) and I know there are good things about that, but it's a pity that now I have more freedom to go out (a) shopping and (b) socializing, it's harder to look in the mirror and be thrilled with what I see.

So I have two options: I can stop looking in the mirror and tell myself that it's not important; or I can try to take a little exercise a little more often, stop giving myself the same size portions as the marathon runner in the family, and lay off the cookies.

One of these things will probably happen, but I'm not making any promises. (Because I function best on reverse psychology, so vowing to become thin and waif-like would lead instantly to telling myself to go take a short walk off a long pier and find some muffins wherever I land.)