I so planned this.

You’re staring at me. Yeah-- I noticed you through my peripheral vision as I was putting on my make-up at the stoplight.

You’re doing that mouth-open, head-shake-stare-thing. It’s cool—I get that a lot. I totally understand. It’s like you’re saying, “Your face looks daaaaaamn fine.” That, or uhm… you want to punch me in the face.

Either way, I’m betting your incredulity has to do with my face somehow.

Yes. I am putting on my make-up in the car. But only at the stoplights. Unless it’s blush, because I don’t need to look in the mirror when I put on my blush.

…What?

What do you mean I should organize my life better so I can do this before I leave the house? Seriously?? What makes you think I didn’t plan on doing this in the car?

Listen. I woke up this morning well before six o’clock. It’s my daughter’s 6th birthday, see, and I still had to make cupcakes to bring to her class. So I was going back and forth between making the cupcakes and the birthday pancakes—which are regular pancakes but the top one is frosted with cake frosting and sprinkles and has a little birthday candle in it?—while the hubby ran to the store to get eggs (out of eggs, wouldn’t you know it!). I was a little tired, because I was up late helping make a sock puppet for the kindergartener, and then sometime around 3 a.m. one of the middle schoolers had trouble sleeping and woke us from a dead sleep to tell us. So yeah, I was a bit groggy, but I still was able to get those cupcakes done and the frosting ready and the gum paste stars (for the top of the cupcakes) all stamped out before I finished up the lunches and got the pancakes on the table for all seven kids.

Then I found a teen’s lost shoe.
And located two pairs of needed clean socks.
Aaaaaand caught the tween trying to escape the house without brushing her hair. Again.

Then I signed a permission slip while I explained to the mildly-off-put teens that I couldn’t give them rides home from school today because my lunch hour was booked with late-afternoon work meetings. So after finding a clean pair of undies and switching the laundry over, I realized it was 7:20. I jumped into the shower, bathed, hopped out, dressed, explained to the 6-year-old three times that I *would* be delivering the cupcakes to her class later in the morning—no later; no, honey, later than that, I can’t go to school with you; because I have to go to work; YES the cupcakes will be thereYES I PROMISE; yes, pinky promise—and grabbed my purse and cell phone and was out of the house by 7:33.

After many “goodbyes” to the younger four, and after dropping one teen off at Clovis High, another at University High and the third at Bullard High, I headed onward to work and arrived here—now—at this very moment, at this very stoplight, where you see me basking in the glory that is my cone of silence.

And yes. I chose this make-up moment. Every last bit of it.

And if I catch the subtext of that look on your face correctly, I agree: I look daaaaamn fine.