Our new car!

Well, I guess we're officially a Mormon family because we finally broke down purchased a minivan! We bought it a week ago at a government auction, which is the same place we bought our Taurus that we've been driving for the past 5 years and we've had a lot of luck there. It's nothing fancy, just a 2001 Dodge Caravan with no power anything so it makes me feel so old school rolling up and down the windows by hand and manually locking each door, but it runs great and the best thing is it only has 16,000 miles so it drives like it's practically new! We paid $4000 for it which is about all I can stand paying for cars anyway. I hate car payments so it was nice to just pay for it from what we'd been saving for a new car, knowing we'd need one once we had another baby and ran out of seats. Our double stroller doesn't really fit in it very well and I do really miss my nice big trunk, but other than that I'm surprised how much I'm liking it so far! I was really dreading getting one but it's not so bad! We went to the auction while Savannah was at school and we didn't tell her anything about it since we didn't know if we'd actually buy anything so it was a surprise for her when we got home and she was SO excited! She's been bugging us about wanting to buy a minivan this whole school year since my neighbor that I carpool with has one and she loves it.

I think the biggest reason Savannah really wanted one so badly is because she always wants to take extra people in the car with us but we never can since our Taurus barely had enough seats for the 5 of us. The first thing she she said was "Now we can take Julian with us everywhere we go!" (Julian is our 4 year old next door neighbor who's an only child so he's sort of like their adopted brother) So of course here are the kids, including Julian, just a few hours after buying it as we drove around to show it to my brother and mom.

This is a picture of the back seat of our Taurus after we got the car seats out of it. I had such a ghetto mom car! I'm determined to keep this new one much cleaner.

Some cheesy pictures of Joe at the auction site right after he bought it.

This is a big, exciting step for our family! I guess now we're one step closer to baby #4! We'll have to start working on that... =)