My kids drive me crazy. No, wait. That's not quite right. It's driving my kids that makes me crazy. Like most parents, my husband and I are on the run, struggling to keep up with our daughters' social, sport and academic agendas. We try to do it all, traveling from school to home to swimming practice. Or to piano, or horseback riding. Or Girl Scouts. In order to keep up, we eat, sleep and change clothes in the car. We are living the life of modern American nomads.

It didn't used to be this way. We used to be a family that lived in our house. I'd greet my husband with a hug when he came home from work. We had time to bathe the kids, read to them and snuggle and lie down in bed with them as they drifted off to sleep. But then the kids grew up and life got complicated.

These days we race into the house after dark and start our bedtime ritual. "Brush your teeth! Put on your PJs! No time for a bath," I tell the kids. "Did anyone feed the cat today?" my husband hollers from downstairs. "Get in bed!" I say. Even going to sleep is done with a sense of urgency.

Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't be better off adding our pajamas to the pile of jackets and junk that already litter the floor of my car. Put a jug of Purell in the back seat and we could just sleep there and freshen up in the morning. That way we wouldn't waste time getting ready. After all, my car has the essentials that any family of wanderers needs. It's got a CD and DVD as well as a week's supply of games and toys, paper and pencils for homework, snacks and bottled water. If I added a roll of duct tape, I could be the poster child for the office of homeland security for emergency preparedness. All I'd have to do is seal the cracks and my family could live there for a week. But, my car also has all of the byproducts of our daily living -- CD cases, pencils with broken tips, markers with no lids, old school papers, food wrappers and empty water bottles. In other words, my car is always trashed.

I try to keep my auto habits a secret. I tell all my girls' friends that they must keep the condition of my car a secret or their parents may not let them visit again. Most kids treat my comment like a joke. But recently, I think I traumatized a kindergartner who happened into my vehicle.

"It's really messy," she said, surprised that anyone's car could look so bad. Her family car is neat and well cared for. I suspect it's even been vacuumed regularly.

"That's because we live in our car," I offhandedly said, tossing off my usual explanation while I buckled her into her booster seat. I had forgotten that 5-year-olds take most everything literally. She had obviously heard that there are families who are so poor that they have to live in their cars and was mistaking us for one of them. As a look of pity crossed her face, I jumped in to explain.

"No, we don't really live in the car," I said with a chuckle, eyeing the food wrappers on the floor, toys in the seat netting and the pillows on the back seat. "We have a home, but we do a lot of driving so it feels like we spend all of our time in the car." She sat there silently trying to process the disparity of what she was seeing and what I was saying.

One evening while the girls were swimming, I was struck by the condition of my car. The ludicrousness of my lifestyle suddenly hit me. Why am I living like this? What would happen if I quit driving them and allowed them to simply just be? Let them be bored. Let them be average. Let them come home from school and be themselves without having to DO anything.

"What!? It would be boring to be home all the time," my older daughter exclaimed when I proposed the idea of dropping activities. This is the same child who clings to me at night and whispers, "I miss you, mommy," in such a small and vulnerable way that I know something has to change.

My younger daughter seized upon the opportunity. "Can I quit piano?" she asked for the 108th time.

"No, you can't quit piano," I told her, but I'm thinking maybe she can. "But we could drop horseback riding."

"Not horseback riding! Can I quit swimming?" "But swimming is so good for you," I told her, handing over her riding helmet and wondering what's going to give. "Have fun with the horse. And honey, please pick up the sandwich crusts that just fell out the car door."