Eat your veggies, Kayla!s

This has been a MAJOR week for me. Seriously. Major.

First of all, we made the very tough decision to enroll two of our children into school. Most of you know I have been homeschooling our three school aged children this year, and with six weeks left in the school year we just had to face the fact that continuing to homeschool them all just wasn't realistic with the life we are all leading right now. Poor Mona was being robbed of years from her life every afternoon when she had to deal with two hours of homeschooling three kids (I did two hours in the am and she did two hours in the pm), AND cleaning the house and making dinner...at the rate she was going, she was only going to be with us for like 23 more days before she a)was committed or b)died,  so I figured it was a good move.

It's tough for me, but I have to admit that I feel about 100 times less stressed out now, and I just think I'll be able to focus more on actually doing things well as opposed to just getting by, kwim?

Even BIGGER news than the school thing is what happened to me while I was in Atlanta this past weekend with Jeff and Kayla. We had gone there to hang out with Amy Tan at the apparel mart on Saturday, but since KA and Jeff are from there, we stayed the night with his parents.

On the drive there, we stopped at a McDonalds to get lunch. While Kayla was placing her order, the cashier asked her to confirm part of her order and KA was staring up at the menu and answered her with a slow "yeah" because she was trying to figure something out with the menu (or something like that), well, me being the mannerly person that I am, I looked at the cashier and said "she means 'yes, ma'am'" jokingly...well the cashier looked at me and mouthed to me "it's OK" in a way that made me realize instantly that SHE THOUGHT I WAS KAYLA'S MOTHER!!! I was HORRIFIED!! I said in a very troubled voice "you think I'm here mom, don't you??" and the cashier said with big eyes, "you're not??"...to which I replied "She is 24!! I am only 12 years older than her!" and the cashier's eyes got even bigger and she said something about how we reminded her of her and her daughter, and then handed me the bag of apple dippers and said "here are mom's apple dippers"...I thought she was kidding at first, but I realized she wasn't...not. at. all. So I was like "I'M NOT HER MOTHER!!" maybe a little too emphatically...I was just SO freaked out by the whole exchange...but Kayla tried to convince me that it wasn't me looking old, but her looking like a 12 year old that was the cuplrit...I didn't totally buy it because she had paid for the food with an American Express card...what 12 year old has an AmEx card?

OK, so it took me a while to get over this...wait! who am I kidding? I'm STILL not over it...but later the same night we were at the mall checking out at a clothing store, when Kayla handed the cashier her ID to complete her purchase. Well, still reeling from my experience earlier in the day, I jokingly said to the cashier, "I'm NOT her mother" thinking no one could ever possibly make that mistake again, but lo and behold the cashier looked at me and said "she's not?? you two are just friends? really?"

WTHeck.

Kayla quickly goes "wait, just wait...how old do you think I am??" and the cashier looked and said "um...14? 16? 14?", and I instantly felt better...not exactly youthful, but better.

That's all I got.