Happy New Year!

Happy 2007! We're back to our regularly scheduled programming today. D in school, A napping, M working, me blogging. We stayed in for New Year's Eve this year, made a special steak dinner for all the solid food eaters in the house, and then watched some movies. New Year's Day it rained, which didn't deter us from visiting the zoo. It was a perfect day, despite the rain, as there were hardly any other people there and the cooler weather made all the animals pretty active. Unfortunately, M locked the keys in the MomMobile so we had to wait 45 minutes for AAA before heading home. But the locksmith who came out was very nice and got the job done quickly. After a lovely two week Christmas/New Year holiday break, I'm rested and relaxed, full of patience and over the baking disasters, etc. I had a bit of a lapse yesterday (D's last day of school hols) when I had to spend the afternoon fending off questions like, "Is this just squishy? Or squishy-sqooshy?" and D's new favorite game "Ask a Parrot a Question!" - she repeats that phrase, in a decidedly parrot-y voice, until you ask her a question which she repeats back to you, and it goes on and on. If you decline to ask a question, she keeps repeating her request over and over until you feel like tiny bits of your brain are being slowly etched away with each repetition. She also learned to play two other games - Sorry! and Whac-a-mole. We all love Whac-a-mole - it's very stress-relieving. She's pretty good at Sorry! too. M's the Grand Champion though, taking two games from me on New Year's Day.

So, I've made some resolutions this year:

1) Lose the rest of the baby weight - from both D & A, through sensible diet and exercise, of course
2) Be more patient, especially with the kids
3) Remember all important friend & family birthdays
4) Write more letters (fewer emails)

I've got 5 birthdays in January, so I better get cracking.

As far as diet and exercise, I'm doing more of a home-fitness regimen this time around. M & I have wasted thousands on gym memberships that we never use after the first few months, and my favorite workout is swimming, so I'm going to try to get to our local pool more often and eat sensibly and see how that works. To kick things off, yesterday morning M & I made a No Cookies pact (we'd been indulging in this tin of delicious European chocolate biscuits). But by 1:00 I was in a frenzied rage of imaginary cookie-deprivation and had obvious withdrawal symptoms, so it's not going to be easy.

A and I are off to the Library this morning, then my sister is coming over to hang out this afternoon and play princess tea-party with us. So, as you can tell, I'm just busy, busy, busy.