My taxi runs are finally done – for this year at least. Yep, I’m hanging up my steering wheel and driving gloves! Yesterday was the end of Steev’s finals and finally my days are free of schedules, alarms going off and me jumping in and out of my minivan 20 times a day!

Finally too, we can all go on that well-deserved vacation. We missed going to Melbourne with Hip2bDad a few weeks ago partly because Steev’s semester was still on and we usually bring the whole battalion along when we go on vacation.

The girls are so excited they started packing this morning and you can imagine the giggles and flurry of activity. There were clothes all over the floor, they were trying on stuff and putting them back and every 5 minutes, one of them was dancing into my room to ask or show me something.

Steev was in his room, totally indifferent to this whole festival of packing. I think it’s a guy thing. If they’re excited, they don’t show it. They pretend everything’s cool and under control. After all, the only things they need to throw together at the last minute are a few shirts, pants and underwear !

Our food bag is packed, stuffed with junk food the kids picked out. By the way, no prizes for guessing. Small hint, this is what we’re packing.

I’m not sure if I’ll have time to blog (will spill everything when I get back so stay tuned). I haven’t seen our agenda yet, the girls are still working on it. But I’ll definitely try to tweet (follow me there) when I’m not too busy sipping a fresh coconut under a palm tree .

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I think in these past two days alone, we must’ve burnt through hundreds of text messages. Whenever Raine is bored, she texts us and we text back. Understandably she misses us when she’s at work!

Yes, Raine has her first job manning a Customer Service counter. How cool is that! At the same time, my 16 year old baby is such a princess at home I can’t imagine her out there handling customer problems!

At work, she alternates between the front desk and any empty desk she can find in the back office. One thing’s for sure, she has such hilarious stories to tell about the people she meets, she has Skye and me rolling on the floor.

So far, she’s had to crawl through what she calls a “bunny hole” which is used for submitting faulty equipment to the back office, dish out the same answer to a guy who asked her the same question 3 times, and do a couple of errands for the Wicked Witch of the West, a ferocious co-worker with bleached hair who seems to hate little girls .

Then an older man asked for directions to the gent’s and Raine referred him to the security guard because she didn’t know where it was, and he sarcastically asked if she’d never been to the restroom. Which she hadn’t! It was her first morning there !

My baby looks so grown up when I picked her up from work today. I think she’s having fun too though she won’t admit it !

Steev came home from class yesterday morning with the beginnings of a cough and fever. Tis the season, that’s one thing. The other is that Steev’s been having chocolates for breakfast, lunch and dinner – almost! Chocolate is very ‘heaty’ (raises internal body heat), hence the fever, or so we believe.

This is only a small portion of the goodies Hip2bDad brought home from Melbourne last weekend and most of it is already in Steev’s tummy .

As for the rest of the chocolates and nuts, my girls have split them up between my two fridges and hidden them deep in the drawers and behind all my other stuff, to be savored little by little when I’m not looking.

I’m guessing Hip2bDad and I are to blame for this bizarre behavior. Steev never tasted a candy till he was 3+! Raine and Skye started a little earlier, around age 2+, because by then, our friends and relatives had begun to notice how deprived our kids were and taken it on themselves to ensure our kids were normal well-fed with chocolates and candy whenever we visited.

Could this be why our teens find chocolates so irresistible? Have we inadvertently caused them to develop Chocolate-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ?

I decided to play hookie this morning and skip gym. Never mind that I’ve put on 2 lbs from eating irregular meals, even missing dinner (is that even possible ?!!) because of last week’s AAR concert hyperactivity – uptown, downtown collecting tickets, meeting the band, dancing the night away (I think that does it for gym) and doing all the crazy stuff that only a mom like me would do. No biggie, we had a blast!

This week, I’m trying to get back into the swing of things. For the first time in history, we ran out of hair shampoo we’ve been washing our hair so often last week. Hate being in crowds and having people breathe and smoke into our hair, ew!

Not only that, we also ran out of dog food and poor Tyson (our beagle, not Ritter though it wouldn’t be so bad having him eat out of our hands !) had to survive on bread crumbs.

What was heartening though was that I noticed quite a number of parents (mostly dads) at the concert that night. True, they looked rather disoriented. Maybe they’re not into AAR music. Maybe it’s their first concert. But at least they made the effort to get themselves involved in their kids’ interests instead of just dropping them off and driving away. Way to go, that’s what I call good parenting!

I think a lot of times, we limit ourselves by saying, now that I’m a parent, I’m too old to be seen doing this or wearing this or whatever. But at the end of the day, as long as I don’t go overboard, it’s okay to have a good time and be myself. To heck what people think, I just do my own thang, ya know .

It’s strange around here for some reason. Every few hours, Raine’s telling me she’s bored. I’m like, what are you saying? you guys are never bored ! It’s true, my kids always found ways to entertain themselves even when they were younger and they never complained about being bored.

We’re definitely having a case of post-concert blues in the house. And I have at least one lovesick puppy on my hands. Heck, if I were 16 and a gorgeous guy like Nick told me he likes my t-shirt, I’d be having a crush too !

After the crazy hyperactivity of the days leading up to the AAR concert, now suddenly whoosh, we have this huge big vacuum. Raine says she can’t even remember what she used to do before the concert.

Not surprising. Once I had a coursemate, a grown woman, who cried for two hours after our course ended, even though the course was so tough we all couldn’t wait for it to end. So yeah! Let’s hope we’ll snap out of it today? Maybe ?

It’s the weekend and I don’t have to take the girls to guitar class. any. more. We finally called it quits! What a relief! You should see my girls grinning from ear to ear. They love to play but apparently their guitar teacher isn’t too keen on teaching.

Or maybe he figures we’re easy money! Of late, he’s either reteaching the same old stuff, or flirting at the front desk. Most days, he’s in class for all of 10 minutes of the one-hour class.

Then out of the blue, the music school informs me the fees have increased because the girls have gone up one grade. They have? When? How? Did they sit for a test I didn’t know about? Nope, but apparently the school has been charging me the lower fee by mistake and now they want me to pay the difference for the past two months.

Frankly if the teacher had been doing a good job, I wouldn’t mind paying. But as it is, he’s been giving the girls a hard time, constantly missing from class and boring them with the same old and the girls’ enthusiasm has taken a nose dive ever since. They lost interest in practising and I practically had to drag them to class, the poor things.

Well, if the teacher figures it’s easy money, he’s got another thing coming. How about a taste of easy come, easy go!?

My kids are all teenagers now and yet they’ve never eaten dragon fruit before. I rarely buy this fruit because I’m indifferent to it myself ! Bad mommy!

Of course, they’ve seen the fruit before but the inside, probably not so they’re mesmerized by the brilliant fuchsia flesh. Who wouldn’t be? Just look at this! Mother Nature sure had a bit of fun with her water colors there!

Apparently the dragon fruit has detox qualities. With 3 teens, you can’t blame me for wondering if it works like acne products in clearing the complexion.

As for trying a piece of this, my 3 picky eaters are like:

Them: Ew, what’s it taste like, Mom?

Me: It tastes like… (long pause) nothing!

They look at me wide-eyed.

Them: What do you mean? You sure?

Me: Yep, it tastes like nothing. Try it!

With exaggerated looks of fake horror, they take a tiny bite each and reel back in real horror!

Them: It’s tasteless.

Me: Exactly what I said . Good, huh? Want some more?

Guess who ended up gobbling up the whole dragonfruit?

We’ve been talking about stopping Raine and Skye’s guitar lessons. It’s not that they’ve lost interest, no. But right now, they seem more interested in listening to music than playing it. True, they’ve been at it for almost a year and have the basics down. By now, I’m guessing they should be playing songs like gushing faucets. Not.

At the same time though, the classes are becoming more of a drag now. The teacher isn’t the fun guy they started out with. For some reason, he seems distracted and often disappears from class to smoke or flirt with the staff outside, leaving my girls to practise on their own.

Earlier on, he asked the girls to give him a CD of their favorite songs that they wanted to learn. He said he liked the songs on the CD too and briefly taught a couple of songs from it. Our CD has never been seen again. Now he’s on to teaching songs by people whom the girls say are from their grandpa’s generation, people like Eric Clapton!! So let’s see where we go from here. We haven’t quit yet but we’re on the verge of.