Baby On Board--Not Any More

A new era has begun. Tonks has her learner's permit. After enduring 30 hours of the most boring driver education imaginable, with a teacher with a stutter--she has passed her knowledge test and gotten a permit to drive.

Of course, we HAD to go up to a parking lot and let her sit behind the wheel and get a feel for what a car really feels like. There were lots of tips in her classroom training about brake, and how to respond to various situations, and Tonks' consistent comment was "This would be a lot more helpful if I knew ANYTHING ABOUT DRIVING A CAR."

Today, she got to try it out. We went up to a parking lot that was about 2/3 empty, and since this was the Prius, all she had to do was take her foot off the brake and it started to move forward. At the incredible speed of 3 miles per hour, which was really fast enough to start, since she had no idea how hard to push the brake. The first couple of times were windshield bangers, except of course we had seatbelts on, but after a few times, she got better.

We did a bunch of turns and it's amazing how much you forget about how to drive until you need to teach someone else. She couldn't seem to get the car straightened out as fast as I thought it should go, and it was only after about 10 minutes that I realized that she was "hand over hand"-ing it, rather than just letting the wheel go and letting the car straighten itself out.

Tonight, we went over to Lake Harriet, where Capt. Sweetie rode with her in the van, letting her drive around the lake. He reports that she's a very good driver, and is only making "baby mistakes." So, we're well on the way to having a third driver in the house.

Of course, the real question is HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? I swear she was just in preschool, and we were researching kindergartens just the other day. How can she possibly be fifteen already? God knows I'm not fifteen years older than I was when she was born, so how can she be?

Perhaps the Swiss hadron collider has made holes in the space-time continuum, and things like this are happening because time has ceased to be uniform or linear. That explains it. And the fact that I don't look any older has nothing to do with Botox--right?