You really gonna wear that?

So last weekend was filled with jobs for Mom’s Taxi Service. I drove Alexa here and there. A lot. Much more than I planned, that’s for sure.

It started with a simple Friday plan. Take Alexa to the library so she could earn a cell phone before the school-year cutoff hit. If she spent two hours with this tutoring program, she earned a Metro POS, I mean PCS phone with service for a month on them. So, I had lunch with my aunt then picked Alexa up, then dropped her off at the downtown library, after making sure she was in the right place and everything. Then I went on my merry way to Weatherford to do an inspection, then back to town to do another. I was closer to the babies than her, so I picked them up first, then we got stuck in traffic. Bad traffic. I'd never seen it backed up that far before. Ever. So the babies and I took back-roads and twisted and turned all over the place, but got there to pick her up before it closed. Whew!

My inspections had taken longer than I expected. We barely made it. But, now Alexa finally had the materials to do the rest of the work. The materials she should have been given 6 months ago. So now she wanted to earn the laptop. The laptop that was really a netbook. But to her, it's a treasure. Friday night, she did some work. Saturday, she got up and started on her work, then wanted to go hang out at the library with them again. I suspect a boy was involved.

I took her to the library and let her stay for the day. She got there about noon and I picked her up about 5. She had a party to go to at 5:30, but she was supposed to bring a dessert and had none. I baked some cookies for her, like a nice mom, while she got ready. I made snickerdoodles, which she doesn't like, but they were fundraiser cookies we needed to get rid of. And of course, I didn't have anything to transport them on, so I improvised. I took a stack of about 5 paper plates and covered them in aluminum foil. Then I stacked the cookies up and covered the whole thing in more foil. Sure, I coulda gone to the grocery store and bought her something, but then we'd still have those cookies in the freezer and she has a new cookie fundraiser coming up for band. I have a feeling we're about to be up to our ears in cookie dough.

Ok, so now we're late for the party. Lee's at work, of course, so we all get in the car and head to the party. She's been to these people's house before a few times, but I never have. I'd looked up the way to get there before we left, and was pretty sure I was going the right way, but Alexa was busy texting on her new phone and wasn't interested in helping find the place. Until her POS had no signal. Ha! Anyway, I mentioned to Taylar that we were taking Alexa to her party. A really bad decision, usually. She said Alexa couldn't be going to a party, she wasn't wearing a dress. Because that is the end-all-be-all of a three-year-old's knowledge of parties. You have to wear a dress. We didn't mention it was a swimming party. That would have been too much for the poor baby to miss out on.

We found the house, no thanks to Alexa. She was back in her phone as we passed the house because she'd given me the wrong house number earlier in the evening. But now, she knew the number. Go figure.

I dropped her off and we headed home. Taylar was upset about missing a party now, so I told her we could go home and have our own party. Would she like chicken nuggets at her party? "No, just cake." What kind of cake? Brown cake. Ok, I had a brownie mix in the pantry, I could do "brown cake". We had party food, first. I made chicken nuggets and gave the girls some queso to dip them in. And broccoli, their favorite vegetable. And some beans, another favorite. And chips to dip in the leftover cheese.

Earlier, while I was waiting for the last batch of cookies, I'd chopped the vegetables for a zucchini casserole. I put it in to bake while we were gone and it was ready to come out just about the time I was ready to put the brownies in. Once the girls saw I had vegetables, they wanted some to go with their party food. So I shared. How can you resist little children begging for vegetables? I know I can't.

Not too much later, it was time to head back to get Alexa. She wasn't ready on time, surprise! But it wasn't too long of a wait. And she was in the first group that came out, so that was nice. The brownies were nice and cool when we got home. I'd even left out the nuts in case Alexa wanted some. But she didn't. She went to her room and I think did some more vocabulary words to try and earn that netbook.

Sunday morning, she wanted to go to church, so I took her there. She was scheduled to work in the nursery, but didn't feel well, so a friend's mom brought her home. She started working on her vocabulary words around noon. The deadline was 5pm, and she was about halfway done. At 4, we left to go to the library. She wasn't done and we needed to talk to the people. They said they'd already told some people they had until 9 to finish, so how could they not let her do the same? But she'd finished the first giant workbook and needed another.

She worked and worked on those words, but she wasn't very good at hitting the keys right, so she missed several. Plus, on some pages, they'd numbered them out-of-order, so she'd do a whole section wrong. I spent a lot of time helping her. Some of the words were kind of tricky. Qualitative had a really funky definition according to the book. Sure, it was a part of the actual definition, but it wasn't a very conceptual answer. Anyway, she worked long and hard. At 9, she was only 10 points away from earning the netbook, so she called the lady to let her know. She needed to finish and call back. Just after 10 on the night before the first day of school, she finally finished. She'd done no preparation for her school day.

She would have been finished before 10 pm if I'd not given her my cell phone to use, because it got better reception. Once I went in to see how she was doing and caught her talking to her boyfriend on her call phone while pausing the system on speaker. She's had her cell phone mearly a week and a half and I've confiscated it at least 3 times so far.

Anyway, she earned her computer, but hasn't received it yet. Not that I'm the least bit surprised. These people are the biggest feet-draggers I've ever met. And I live with Lee, who runs on CPT.

She's signed up with the same company for this school year. At least this time she has a phone number of someone to bug. The grand prize this year is an Ipod Touch. She's really been wanting one of those. I can't see spending that kind of money for something she's going to lose/break within a few months, but if she wants to earn one, I'm all for that. Maybe she'll take care of it.