today was a really great day, and there is no other explanation other than the fact that i went running BY MYSELF for 30 minutes this morning. i don't think i have done that in 4 years. of course, i have had time to myself, but not to run outside alone in the morning. i never knew how crucial that is.

anyway, despite the fact that it was a rainy gray day, we had a great time, and i never got anxious about all of the messes, etc. sometimes after 6 hours of being inside with crafts and toys and cooking and snacks i start to feel a little, well, tense. but today we had a great time with our crafts, and somehow i got the weekend cleaning done (how??? i have no idea. usually i feel like the house will never be clean).

and i imlemented one of the more brilliant ideas of motherhood that i have. when we were at the ups store, carter spotted the rolls of paper for adding machines and pointed to them. i looked and thought, hmmmm....lots o' fun for $1.50 each. today, when they were playing in their room, i set them out at their little table along with a box of markers and crayons, and when they emerged, you would have thought santa had visited. talk about a lot of fun. you can write on them, you can draw on them, they can be a bandage, they can be an accessory. you can pretend you are a rhythm gymnast, you can make up a scavenger hunt, and you can write secret messages. and when you are tired of all of that, you can make a nest.

what is really great is that they are so narrow and they pretty much force one to write in a line--something that ava does most of the time, but sometimes the words sort of fall all over the paper. this was a good way to impose some structure without her being aware.

we made applesauce --carter refused, ava gobbled.

carter said "stuck"-- as in "mama...deet deet...stuck" (mommy, my train is stuck).

we finally went out in the afternoon. first to the animal shelter. hooray! kitties! ooops. closed for a function. very very upset carter. tears, wailing..."meeeeeooooowwwwww! meeeeeeeeeeeooooooowwwww!!!!" lesson: do not promise kitties, ever. use as a surprise.

then to the toy store. lots and lots of fun there. no longer have to worry about carter tripping and falling on the stairs or raiding all of the shelves--he is content to just play. ava, not as engaged. then to the bookstore, then home.

ava and i did the 60 piece jigsaw puzzle that we purchased, and she was VERY proud of her accomplishment. carter liked his lacing beads. which also substituted as a sorting challenge.

so, between some of the life-skills lessons i have received lately regarding dealing with difficult situations that are complicated (that is deliberately opaque), and my morning run, things got pretty darn cheery around here.

that and i read an amazing article in a quaker magazine about parenting, and it just reiterated my deepest feelings about raising my children. please let me do 1/4 of the job the parents in the article did. it was inspiring to say the least.