Fall is a great time for a fresh start. With the beginning of a new school year we try to get our acts together and get organized around planning simple dinners and easy lunches. We've got to organize all the various family members' schedules. It gets the us A types very excited.

One of the freaky things about having kids is that you'll be tooling along in your life when, WHAMM!, they'll say or do something that just knocks your socks off and makes everything stop. If you're lucky, you're not too self-obsessed with blogging or reading headlines on I Can Has Cheezburger to notice and you do stop and appreciate the moment and figure out what's really going on in those little brains. This happened to me this weekend.

While I was very busy in the front of the car doing something important like thinking of soup taglines, a little voice chirped up from the back seat. It said something like this:

"You know, I really understand why J is having such a hard time being four. Because I remember when I was four and I had to grow up a lot and go to big kid school and do a lot of stuff for myself and J was just born so he was a baby and got to have everything done for him and I was jealous and it was hard."

OK so her grammar was probably better than my recounting of it, but that was the gist of it.

I should never admit this, but when I was younger I kind of liked the idea of being a soccer mom. The image of popping my athletic kids into a station wagon and driving them around our little town to their various activities seem kind of nice. It does make the suburbs sound kind of appealing to think about little leagues and soccer games and all of that. But I don't think I could have really done it. It's just not in my DNA code. Luckily you can have all that team sport goodness right here in NYC - no car or mommy jeans necessary.