Police beat, Jersey style

Today was one of those days. It started with Jane waking up way too early from her nap. I thought if I let her fuss for a minute she would go back to sleep, but she just kept crying. When I went up to check on her Ethan had taken it upon himself to get her out of her crib, and carry her into our room and put her on the bed. A total no no. I was not pleased to say the least. I thought we better get out of the house and do something before I beat somebody.

We decided to go to our ward "playgroup". That would give the kids a chance to run around outside and me to be social and meet some new people. I really wasn't in the mood to say the least but figured I should do it anyway. The playgroup was in a neighboring town at a park I had never been to. I put it in the GPS and off we went. This town has crazy weird roads where it's two way then changes to 3 lanes of one way all the sudden and people are passing on all sides and it's just hard to keep up with all the changes. The GPS told me to turn left at the next intersection, so I barely to the left and look up just in time to make sure it was the right road and turn left. Before I can even finish the turn I see a police officer flagging me to pull over. Are you kidding me? Sure enough you can't turn left on that street! I told him I am new in town, like that wasn't obvious, with my minivan with Utah plates, Utah drivers license and frazzled looking mom in the driver's seat?! I told him the GPS told me to turn left there. Apparently the law changed the end of July, awesome. I get a sweet ticket and have to go to court. The only thing that made me feel a tad better was he "waved" another lady over while he was still processing my license, and she at least had Jersey plates. I pull away and the GPS is saying "arriving at destination" and yet there is no park in site. I decide to just flip around and look again. When I do, I see nothing and at this point am definitely not in the mood for playgroup and decide to head home. I don't have my home destination in the GPS yet and figured I would just return the way I came. BAD idea. I turned right onto a 3 lane one way road. Two people immediately started waving their arms and yelling. One lady in a convertible in the 3rd lane over was laughing hysterically. For whatever reason it was the woman laughing at me that put me over the edge. Thankfully traffic was light and I was able to quickly get turned around without it get "hairy". The other good thing is the officer was just over the corner from me now with head down writing another ticket. Thank heavens. What would he do if he saw me now? Impound my car? Good news is I went down another street and accidentally ran into the park I had intended to go to.

Fast forward to this afternoon. I go out my front door to check my mail and there are two plain clothes officers, two "real" officers, one marked police car and one "under cover" car right in front of my house. Wow, what's goin' down in my hood? I guess they had pulled him over and looked in his trunk and called for backup or something. I don't want to know why. It couldn't have been too bad though because a while later, the police left and the guy just stood around his car until another guy was dropped off and then they both jumped in and drove away with the new guy driving. Maybe they took the first guy's license. Who knows. Pretty exciting.

The worst part about all this is I finally decided I need to get serious about losing some weight, but as we all know I eat when I'm stressed and today certainly qualified for some treat of sorts. I was good though and tonight when we walked downtown to Dunkin donuts, I went over to Starbucks and opted for some flavored warm milk. The bad news is I gave it to Kate to take a sip seeing that warm milk is totally her thing and she dropped it spilling it all over the sidewalk. The funny part was she immediately shouted "dang Starbucks!" A nice ending to a fairly lousy day.