It's Thursday And I Know I Should Be Thankful...

but right now my chest hurts, my heart is racing 90mph, and I just had the most terrifying 2 mile ride in the car!!

For those of you with teens...well...you'll understand my traumatic experience!! I let Kat get behind the wheel of the car this morning. *hands and body is still shaking*

Let me do some back tracking as to WHY I let her...lol

Last night, after church, Laura (the youth minister) was going to bring Kat home. Conversation led to her asking Kat if she had a license. Kat said she had a permit but hadn't been behind a wheel yet because I wasn't ready. (hehehe...this girl knows WHY I wasn't ready...Matt almost killed me twice!!) So Laura says, here's the keys. Kat jumped for joy and proceeded to drive home under Laura's patience and guidance. Kat was on cloud nine and told me all about it.

I figured if she did this well, and because she begged to drive to work this morning, that maybe it wouldn't be so bad. Sadly, that just wasn't the case...

She first had to back up in the driveway and then pull around the semi-circle in front of house to get onto the road. There are a few plants, trees and flowers that block a portion of the road if you pull up too far...I told her where to stop, how to glance between and when to pull out. We made it fine...but she almost took out 2 of the neighbor's mailboxes before she straightened enough to keep it between the lines. We got to the stop sign and we abruptly stopped 5ft short of the line to where she couldn't see oncoming traffic to her left. She creeped slowly up then stopped abruptly again. (At least the 2nd time my head didn't feel like it was going to snap off.)

Finally, we were off. The next two miles were gut-clenching, butt-chewing-hole-through-seat, intensive-therapy-to-get-over-trauma kind of drive. She rode the outside line to the point we ended OFF the road on several occasions. She was so close to a few mailboxes that I could reach out and touch them. She never made it out of 2nd gear...keeping it between 30-35mph...BUT...it was speed up...slow down...speed up...slow down. We finally made it to the next stop sign and I nearly snapped my head off again. She looked all ways and pulled forward...we made it to the church and I had her pull into the parking lot. She didn't have it completely stopped when she put it in park.

I was never so more glad to be switching places and driving again...OMG!! OMG!! OMG!! And it is painfully obvious that I truly don't have the patience as a driving instructor...we were both in tears as I drove the remaining 5 miles to her work.

As traumatic as this was for me...I just hope I didn't make it worse for her by screaming, "STAY OFF THE SIDE OF THE ROAD" 15 gazillion times.