Those of you with young children can look forward to a milestone in their lives that comes with puberty and helps make the transition even more fun and exciting. I’m not sure who decided that the best time to put kids out on the road for the first time was when they were being driven to psychosis by the hormones raging in their bodies. Makes sense to me.
When L started learning, both of our vehicles had manual transmissions. Beck and I hate automatics and niether of us would own one. But it soon became apparent that the poor girl was just not going to be able to master the finer points of driving AND learn the trick of operating a clutch. So I found a great deal on a ’94 Buick Century, perhaps the unsexiest car ever made, but a ‘good runner’ as they say. As in, “Yah, she’s a good runner, y’know.” So that got one girl on the road. Delayed by a year but independant, no more chauffering that one around and she can take Q places as well. She bitches about the gas she has to buy though. One mystery to me is that although we paid for the car and we pay for the insurance, she refers to it as “my car.”
Q turns sixteen in May and has her permit, which in MN means she can drive with an adult. I had her drive me to the drugstore last night and then we took a loop around the burbs. She did a pretty good job, her corners and stops need some smoothing out, but she’s confident and careful and is trying to do it right. She also seems to have passed through the worst of the obnoxious stage. It happened suddenly a couple weeks ago. She actually is cheerful and fun to be with like the old Q. She actually was asking me for advice and deferring to my experience without a single eye-roll.
L won’t be taking the car to college, so Q can use it next year. That only gives us four months of fist fights over who gets to use it.