A testing time during the floods

Back in the days when print was king and before the internet ruined everything, yours truly had a lifesize, 20-week, scan photo of daughter #2 as a screensaver on a jumbotron Apple Mac monitor at work that weighed more than you.
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Daughter #2’s scan picture caught the eye of everyone that walked past in that sweaty old newsroom, in the days when nothing moved around here without us knowing about it. And then we plastered it all over the front page.

We found out we were having daughter #2 in the days between England beating Germany 5-1 in Munich and the Twin Towers.

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The weekend before that we laid a load of cheap laminate flooring in our lounge which felt like you were crowdsurfing every time you set foot on it.

We even borrowed a circular saw to cut the planks to size (well, sort of) without slicing off any of our fingers or blinding ourselves. And that, my friends, is a result.

The reason I mention it is because the subject of that scan picture, born 6lbs 5oz, three weeks early in May 2002, passed her driving test on Monday.

I know time marches on but that’s plain ridiculous. Eighteen in three months and 5ft 10ins tall. I can’t believe it.

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Thanks in no small part to the boss’ family tradition of depositing £30 each birthday and Christmas into a bank account for every child in lieu of a present they don’t need and won’t miss, the ordinarily ruinous cost of having driving lessons becomes merely prohibitively expensive.

Because of the havoc wreaked by Storm Ciara there was some umming and ahhing as to whether Monday’s tests should go ahead as planned. But go ahead they did, and, like her mum 33 years ago, she had to perform an emergency stop for real because a dog ran out in front of her car (both dogs were fine, by the way).

So now all that’s left to do is put daughter #2 on our car insurance. I daren’t call the brokers to get a quote just yet. Daughter #1 was an extra £60 a month when we last renewed and she passed her test two years ago.

God help me.

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