Kids driving cars.. been there, done that..!

Kids driving cars.. been there, done that..!
I just read that a little 6-year-old kid decided he was hungry and decided to drive to Applebys. He took the booster seat out of the back of the car, put it on the driver's seat and proceeded to back about 75 feet till he came to a stop. Several things cross my mind at this point. One, that's either a very hungry child, or a very precocious one who will go far in the world someday.. even farther than 75 feet! Or two, he'll be doing jail time for boosting cars in a booster seat. And three.. been there, gone through that..

This story brings me back to when my beautiful daughter who is now 26, was just a 4-year-old and decided that she'd waited long enough for me to run in to see my parents and she was going to go ahead and drive home and meet me there. I had a big blue extended van, so here she was, a little bit of a thing, standing up with one hand on a steering wheel that was about as tall as she wasand her other hand took the van out of gear. Fortunately, I'd had the foresight to turn the darned thing off.. Unfortunately, I forgot to set the emergency brake.

I head merrily out the door, waving goodbye to my parents and turn my head from them to the carport. What the...???? My huge van was gone and so was my little girl kid! HOLY CRAP! My parent's carport was set on a slope and when my babygirl brought the gear shift down, the van the size of the state of florida rolled gently down the slope, across a thankfully empty street and through the neighbor across the street's wooden fence. Luckily the fence wasn't actually built yet, but the posts had been set.

The van backed over a fence post and came to rest in the sparcely-landscaped yard. Ok, there was no grass there, just scrub green stuff, but they were trying to get an actual yard going. We're lucky that that dream hadn't happened yet in some ways, as we'd have had to replace elegant landscaping. AAA when they came to get me off the post..umm, not so lucky.

After looking right and left and not seeing my van anywhere, or my daughter, the thought struck me that both were stolen. Not having very bright street lights on that street at the time, it took me a second after I scared the years off my mom and dad with my screaming and jumping up and down in fright, to look across the street and see the van. I ran down the slope, across the street and jerked the door open. My daughter was there, hanging onto the steering wheel for dear life. Hysterical and hiccuppy, tears were streaming down her little adorable face. I grabbed her to me and cried as well.

I held her away from me and wiped her little face. "What were you DOING?" I asked.
"I wanted to drive." she said. Visions of backing into a car, a bike rider, a mom with a stroller, a family of five out for a jog, all danced through my head. I quickly looked under the van to see if, indeed, one or two of the latter were pinned under the runaway vehicle. Whew.. we were lucky this time.

The saga continues: I got my girl out of the van and into my dad's arms and started up the van and prepared to drive back up the slope, park back in the car port and go to the bathroom, which, lucky for me, hadn't been an involuntary function with all the shocks of the previous 5 minutes. I pushed on the gas and the tires spun and the van went nowhere. I backed up and tried again.. THUNK and it stopped. Oh, crap, now what?

I bent over straight-legged (back in the day when I COULD do that) and saw that fence post was up against my gas tank. Double crap. Calling AAA, I went back in with my folks and my girl.. and went to the bathroom, at last. About 30 minutes later, the wrecker came to help me off the post.

Remember how I said that they were TRYING to have a yard? Well, the wrecker guy knelt down in the grass and started moaning and spouting some words that made me glad that my daughter was in the house with the folks.. turned out that the yard they were growing was all sand burrs and his knees were in them to the hilt. He hopped up and his jeans were nailed to his knees with the burrs. Yikes.. I apologized and backed a little farther away from him rather that right in the 'Hey, I'll help you' zone. He pulled on the material of his jeans and they unstuck from his knees, but man, I'll bet they burned like all get out.. he quietly picked the burrs off the jeans and kept shooting looks at me between picking them off and trying to get them unstuck off of his fingers to hurl them away from him. I smiled, shakily, refraining from asking if I could help.. I'm such a helping type of woman.

I don't remember how he actually got my van lifted up enough to jettison it off and over the fence post, but I do know that the post knocked a tiny crack in my gas tank. For the next year, every time I got into the van to go anywhere, I had to kneel down and rub a bar of soap on that little crack to keep the gas from flowing out. Apparently, soap is a great 'stopper of thing that leak'. Unimpressed with a little gas the soap doesn't break down with the fluidity of the gas. Who knew? Another thing I learned was that I went through a lot more gas during rainy season when I'd run through a puddle and have to quickly crawl under the van on the wet street to soap my tank or I'd never make it home AND have gas in the van.

A year or so later, I ran into the wrecker guy and he asked me out. I asked him how his knees were. THEN he suddenly remembered who I was and pointing down past his shorts, I saw the little scars from the sand burrs that had imbedded into his knees. When I looked up, he was backing away telling me to have a good day and I guessed at that point, our prospective date was already over. Ah well, hasta la pasta to Wrecker Man.

My girl grew up and did learn how to drive. Not with all that much confidence but we did learn quickly that she had no rhythm for the fine art of a standard shift. And to this day she hates driving so much that subconsciously, her vast intelligence with her being in dual enrollment, the Gifted group, Dean's list, incredible grades all through school and college, able to take three chemistry classes at the same time, etc., is totally fueled by the fact that she wants a job that will afford her a chauffer to drive her around so she doesn't have to do it herself. Personally, I'm behind her on that one. But she has turned out to not be a bad driver at all. But I'm going to enjoy her having someone to drive her around as well. She needs the break.. heck, she's been driving since she was FOUR!

Copyright 2007, from Bekki Shanklin's 'Thinking all the time' series