I’ve just finished baking a batch of my infamous cheese-crusted melt-in-the-mouth shepherd’s pie and they’re sitting in my oven waiting to be delivered to my two princesses at school.

Wednesdays and Thursdays, I have one finishing school at 4:00pm and the other at 5:30pm. My poor teens are up from dawn and at school from 7:00am with a measly 20-minute recess. That’s 10 hours straight, yes, even longer than working at an office. And of course, they’re most generously allowed a lunch break at 2:00pm.

That’s when I’ll be standing outside the prison school gate with a bunch of other parents waiting to sneak them lunch over the school fence!! I feel so sorry for my poor girls I just have to make them an extra special lunch to brighten up their day.

I pack their school lunches with a bottle of ice-cold water each and sunblock as they’ll be out in the blazing 95 degree sun all afternoon. Sometimes I throw in a couple of candies just for treats. These school hours are a real drag and frankly I can’t wait till they finish high school! Oops, look at the time, I’m off to grace the prison gates !

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So I was in a good mood today and decided to let Steev drive. He drives his dad’s car more than he drives mine. I probably should let him practise more often but a part of me is saying, let him practise on a stick shift saloon first before he tackles an automatic 7-seater.

He’s driven my minivan around the neighborhood a couple of times. This afternoon, as we turned the corner onto a 3-lane road, some jerk in a big black pickup truck decided to tailgate us, causing him to edge to the side, almost hitting the tail of a car that was just turning into the McD’s drive-thru. Gave me a heart attack!

The rest of the drive was pretty smooth. He handled the highway very well, I have to give him that. He didn’t speed. He didn’t do any of the things I’ve seen other new drivers do. He just cussed a little. He probably got that from me . We live in B.A.D (Bad Attitude Drivers) City where cussing is a necessary stress reliever!

And you know what? It’ll be a while before I’m comfortable having Steev drive alone. I know, I know, more and more parents are allowing their high school kids to drive themselves to school, and Steev’s already a college sophomore. So why am I such a scaredy cat?

Every day, I see those teens climb into their cars outside the girls’ school and it never fails to horrify me the way they slam on the accelerator and veer out onto oncoming traffic and other kids walking out the school gate, without so much as turning their heads . A car is a lethal weapon, not some harmless vga cable with audio!

Steev’s not a bad driver. He just needs to chalk up more experience on handling emergency situations like cars emerging from out of nowhere, cars trying to run you off the road, cars driven by people who don’t give a damn.

It’s not him I’m worried about. It’s those other drivers out there who don’t know if they’re coming or going, and simply don’t care!

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So we were at the wedding of a cousin recently and this is what my teens were doing. Cell phones and PDAs in hand, they were having a roaring time challenging each other to games, much to the disapproval of an elderly gentleman sitting nearby!

If there’s a way to tear a teen away from their cellphone, I’d like to hear about it. Honestly! Lately we’ve even had laptops on the breakfast table. I had to put an end to that, pronto!

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Right, so we’ve got another teen at the crossroads now. Raine will be finishing high school this year and she’s trying to figure out what she wants to do next. Not surprising since school is abuzz with this topic lately, compounded by the fact that colleges are making their promotional rounds at high schools to recruit students for their next intake.

Suddenly it’s got the high school seniors thinking and wondering. One of Raine’s friends wants to be a pilot and that’s shocked her parents into going, oh no, you’re NOT! And they’re having big fights over this . Thank goodness Raine has no interest whatsoever in flying, whew!

We’ve all been at the crossroads before at that age and for some of us, it’s not been the easiest thing. I remember being clueless and then ended up being somehow nudged into the world of computers which I quickly grew to love. So mine has a happy ending.

But yeah, if you choose a field you’re passionate about, there’s a bigger chance you will do well and be happier pursuing a career you enjoy rather than having to drag yourself in to work every morning.

And I’m so excited for Raine. She has a variety of interests – writing, food, design, people – and there are so many ways she could go with these. She wants to dabble in a bit of everything, of course, but she knows she has to pick one to major in.

She’s feeling the pressure now because some of her friends have already decided or their parents will be deciding for them. We’ve been having these long chats, researching different options, exploring different combinations. We still have a ways to go but we’re getting there !

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So there we were, stuck at home with Raine nursing the return of a persistent cough and groggy from her cough medication, and Skye hit by a sudden bout of food poisoning shortly after breakfast. Not sure what caused it – we all ate the same thing but none of us were struck down.

Oh no, not another boring weekend! Know that the mall is our second home on weekends. Take that away from us and we become grouchy and edgy, swinging from the ceiling fan and chewing on our toenails. Or better, watching Lady Gaga videos for entertainment !

My teens have long sensed that Lady Gaga isn’t someone I necessarily approve of. So it was something of a shock, to both me and them, that a boring Saturday night found me sitting there with my poker face on, watching the Gaga wreathing and writhing ever so unabashedly on the Today Show !

Sure, she’s bold and talented, I grant her that, and possibly even vaguely entertaining to a shopaholic family with no place to go on a weekend. Still I’d rather she had a little more fabric on her where it matters! I mean, my teens are watching, know what I mean?! Gah!

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Raine and 3 of her friends signed up for driving school over the weekend. Yes, it’s just a month since Steev got his driver’s license and now it’s Raine’s turn. The theory part is usually conducted at a center not too far away from where we live. I just assumed since Steev and all his friends had their class there that that’s where Raine and her friends were going to be at.

The driving school has a van to ferry them there which was all well and good.  I was going to pick her up and take her out to lunch. We had it all planned. Except neither Raine nor I expected they were going to be transported to another driving center located in a small town more than an hour’s drive away from the city.

Her text messages started coming in at the rate of 1 per minute. Mom, they’re taking us somewhere far! Where? Dunno!! and our text messages just kept flying back and forth. From some of the names of places they were speeding by in the van, Hip2bDad and I huddled over Google Maps checking out possible locations and calling up for directions.

We weren’t exactly panicked but we were really, really concerned. True, I hadn’t thought to ask but couldn’t the driving school have informed us? Within minutes, we were heading out to look for this place “hidden in some plantations with horses and mountains nearby”. We had no idea where it was. The only thing we had to go by were the sketchy landmarks Raine was texting us.

We sped down narrow roads, winding roads and near-deserted highways like this one:

… and drove past clumps of trees and bare land with no buildings in sight. Living in the city, we’re used to seeing buildings, lots of them and the thought of our princess out there in a place with no buildings was not a comforting one!

It took us 2 hours to find the ’shack’ tucked deep in an obscure spot off the beaten path. It’s absolutely the craziest place to house a driving center! This is the country road leading from the driving center. We could almost reach out and touch the hills and there was barely another human in sight!

We couldn’t even find a place to buy lunch for the girls We had to resort to pulling up at a gas station to grab some bread rolls, potato chips and canned drinks!! It was the best we could do under the circumstances.

After we dropped off lunch, we went home to wait. There was still a half day left to the driving course and the van was to bring them back to the city. To the parents of Raine’s 3 friends, this was not a big deal at all. The girls called home but their parents weren’t unduly alarmed. They were comfortable not knowing where their teenaged daughters had been taken.

Not us. We dropped everything and jumped in the car. We couldn’t not know! We had to see her and know where she was! It was a long day! Raine finally arrived home around 5 in the evening, safe and sound, after a 2-hour ride back in the stuffy, speeding van. She’d been away a whole day but it felt more like months. I’ve never been so relieved to see her!

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