It's 14:40, do you know where your children are?

I do, and I'm damn glad they're not with me.

This has been the toughest part of this moving thing: not the transition from the US to the UK, but the transition from working full time to parenting full time. Both of my kids have gone to daycare since they were three or four months old. There was a fabulous daycare at Himself's office and the girls absolutely loved it. They would run gleefully down the hall when we dropped them off in the morning, and come home in the evening with stories of the fun things they'd done all day.

But here? We are a full-on stay-at-home Mama and kids these days. Devil will start school (!) in September, and Boo will start in a day nursery (the equivalent of full time daycare) at the same time, but until then its the three of us. Trying not to kill each other. Or rather, them bouncing off the walls with energy that used to be directed into stuff at daycare, and me trying to keep my shit together enough to keep them entertained and out of trouble. It's been really hard. Really, really hard. Hard enough for me to think "You know? I'm really not cut out for this." on more then one occasion.

However, it has gotten better. We've discovered the local playgrounds, both indoors and out. We have become veteran Tube riders - we're right on the District line which takes us to lots of good kid stuff very easily. We've found the local swimming pool, and we live a 10 min walk from a very large park with lots of trails to explore. We spend a lot of our time out and about. The upside of this is that I've lost 6 pounds since we moved simply from pushing close to 100 lbs of kids + stroller all over West London. The down side is that they aren't getting enough interaction with other kids and I'm getting hardly any down time for myself. Not a good combo.

So this morning Himself took them off in the rain to the museum. He just texted me to say they wouldn't be back for another hour at least. I've cleaned up my desk, done a couple loads of laundry, made the guest bed for my MIL who comes next week while he goes back to the States for a business trip, and I'm about to have lunch with my book. In peace and quiet.

Thank goodness.