Not much has changed since Driver's Ed.

Like any childhood friends, the three of us girls love to sit around and reminisce about growing up together. We could laugh forever about the time I got stuck in a baby's dress, Hannah dressed up as Mrs. Swishbone and Maggie peed her pants.  As our time writing on this blog goes on, I'm sure you will hear all those stories and more but today, I thought I would share a funny story during Maggie and I's first few months as friends...

Hannah and I had met over the course of the 9th grade school-year, and Maggie and her were the best of friends but I didn't really get the chance to know Maggie myself until the summertime.  Although-- Maggie would say she knew who I was but didn't like me because of some girl-drama from 8th grade;)  The only thing I knew about Maggie was that she liked to wear blush- lol.

In the summer of 2001, we started Driver's Ed. Maggie and I took our class at Auto Pilots- the biggest joke of a driver's ed company in existence- where the classroom instructor had a curly mullet and every test was open-book.  We got to choose the groups we would learn to drive with and ended up partnering together along with our (still) good friend Hailey.

Hailey and Maggie sporting our awesome T's!

Since there were three of us taking turns driving, we had to spend three hours in the car on select early Saturday mornings that summer.  We brought the Blink 182 CD to rock out to while we drove the PT Cruiser around town accomplishing our instructor's errands.  

Right away, we knew it wasn't going to be good when she would stop randomly for verrrrrry looooooonnng and drawn out "potty breaks".  It seemed like we would just start to head in some unknown direction and she would ask us to stop at the nearest restroom for just a minute. Teenage girls do NOT have time for people with IBS.  BUT, if we didn't stop, she would threaten us silently with her deadly toots.


Sidenote: now that I think about it, one of Hannah and I's first classes together was speech and our teacher constantly left the room for long potty breaks too. I think we ended up having to teach ourselves speech that year! Hannah and I still laugh about this... anyone from 9th grade speech remember???  Megan? :) Lol.


Anyway, I remember one particular morning that we drove out to Adel or the boonies or something (the country is relative when you're from West Des Moines) and she had us drop her off at a rodeo (in actuality it was probably something waaaay cooler like a tractor show).

We waited in the car for 30. WHOLE. minutes. while she perused the vintage John Deere's.  Aren't we supposed to be DRIVING??  This is driver's ed, ya know?!

As you can imagine, at 15 years of age, those 30 minutes felt like 7 years.  So we did what every logical teenage girl would do (is that an oxi-moron?) and decided to mess around with the car.

Hailey was in the driver's seat and Mags had her head out of the sunroof dancing to All The Small Things. Meanwhile, Hailey decided to inspect the car's dash in preparation for her high school Auto class (err something) and while unsuspecting Maggie enjoyed her dance moves on top of the car, Hailey's hand slipped and Maggie got a face full of wiper fluid.  Whoops.

Poor Hailey, it's not like she'd had a lot of experience behind the wheel of a parked car before! ;)

There must have been something other than cow poo in the air that morning because our adventures continued to worsen. Upon our instructor's return from the epic tractor-sale, I got behind the wheel and was determined to get my hands on a Sausage Egg McMuffin.  I jerked the vehicle into the nearest McDonalds and began to place our order at the drive-thru.

The man on the other side of the speaker box told me to pull around to pay and because NO McDonald's EVER seems to have the first drive-up window open, I bypassed it and headed straight for the second one.

All I remember was a frantic McDonald's cashier in a visor running from window #1 to window #2 to get the money for our order all while screaming, "Ma'am, Maaaa'aam!". I sped on by, clueless of what I was doing while the girls screamed and laughed.  We received our food and in my embarrassed attempt to get the heck outta dodge, I ran over the median and bottomed-out the Cruiser. Gosh, how complicated can a drive-thru get??

Maggie (left) and I, later that fall.  The date on the camera is about 5 years off, btw;)

Those first few weeks as friends, goofing off in the car learning how to drive, really bonded us that summer.  Despite the lack of a quality instructor, I was so glad to have wonderful friends to help me navigate through the rural roads of Adel and soon, the hallways of Valley High School.