Running = Sanity

These are my two older children.  I show you their smiling and shining faces because you need to see just how adorable they appear in order to understand what little hellions they are capable of turning into.  It's back to school time, and since my oldest, Oliver, is starting kindergarten on Wednesday and my second, Elliot, is going back to preschool on Tuesday, a trip to the shoe store was in order.  If you have children, you understand that there are few excursions that inspire as much dread as a trip to the shoe store.  Taking them one at a time would have been wiser, but really, I despise shoe shopping with my children so much, I'd rather just do it quick and dirty style and be done with it.  So the four of us - the baby, Charlie, had to come, too, though thank goodness he didn't need shoes - went to the shoe store and I was on a mission to search and conquer.  And my children were horrible.  HORRIBLE.  I take some small comfort that every parent who came in there with more than one child was having the same experience as I was, but still, it sucked all the way around.  They ran around, they wrestled with each other and poked each other with shrieks of "He's touching me!" and "Get your foot off my head!" while I tried to find my 5 year old's size, as well as fine the ONE pair of shoes in the whole store that I could even get on to my 3 year old's feet (poor kid has a really high instep AND wide feet - not a good combo for quick trips).  They almost knocked over a display of sale shoes and the behaved so badly, I threatened to not take them to the playground afterwards (though I did, because it would have been a punishment for *me* to not let them burn off some of that energy), and spent the whole trip getting shoes one handed since I had to keep swinging an exhausted Charlie in the car seat (he was asleep when we got there, eyes popping WIDE open as soon as we got into the store ).

Anyway, we did manage to get some shoes, and the children continued in the same vein for the rest of the day, so that when we got home from a visit to Haakan's work - where they kids also ran amok and freaked out when we left without snacks because of their crazy behavior - I informed him that our children were going to drive me to drink.  "You need to go out and run," he said.  And that, dear readers, is exactly what I did.  You've never seen a gal put on her running clothes so fast.  I ran around the hilly lower loop of the reservoir and every lap felt like a gift to myself.  It was one of those runs that was hard, yet effortless at the same time.  I did 6.4 miles and felt great the whole time.  It was a gorgeous 74 degrees, sunny in that fabulous late afternoon kind of way, and all the way around, the perfect antidote to my horrendous day.  I came home to three little kids who were *thrilled* to see me, who were fed and went to bed easily.  They even wanted to read stories with me, which is a rare treat since they're usually just all about daddy in the evenings.  A good run is like a mental sorbet, cleaning out all the nasty tasting remains of the day and leaving you fresh mentally and nicely tired and ready to wind down for the night.