One More Transition From Who I Was to Who I Am Now

With baby #3 on the way, it was inevitable.

We knew we would need to upgrade to a more practical vehicle.

We had talked about swapping cars.  I would take my husbands SUV and he would take my car.  It seemed more practical anyway with all the commuting and traveling my husband does.  My Accord beats his MDX's highway mileage, well, "by a mile", by many, many miles to be exact.  With gas at almost four dollars a gallon it would save us money to.

I had bought my car for its practicality.  The only splurge was the fact that it had leather seats.  It had decent gas mileage which was important since at the time I was commuting to my teaching job at a school district an hour away.

It was just a car.  That was my mantra.

My husband bought his vehicle because he wanted a nice vehicle with all the latest gizmos and gadgets and he wanted an SUV to tow his boat. He lost interest in the gizmos and gadgets within the first 25,000 miles.  With almost 300,000 miles to date, he has an attachment to his car that no amount of cajoling on my part will break.  According to my husband, it is a perfectly good car that has never needed any major repairs.  With that many miles, its reliability is eventually going to come to an end and I don't want to be the one driving it when it does.

In the end we both agreed that I had to trade in my car...for a minivan.

For someone who always said that a car is just a car, I was having a hard time adjusting to actually driving a minivan.  I had been dragging my feet on actually doing research about models and makes.  So last week after searching the Internet and many calls and trips to various car dealerships, we finally settled on a particular minivan.

On Tuesday evening, when the car salesman said they could have it ready for us on Thursday, I actually breathed a sigh of relief.  I had two more days to adjust to the idea of driving a minivan. 

I don't know why I was having so much difficulty adjusting my image of how I saw myself with the image of a woman driving a minivan.  So much for my "a car is just a car" mentality.  Maybe it was because I couldn't get the soccer mom image out of my head.  The car makers have done such a good job branding the minivan as a "soccer mom's car" that that was all I could see it as.  Any mom will tell you she's more than a mom and I couldn't get over being branded as "just a mom" every single time someone looks at my car.

Needless to say, I made peace with the idea pretty quickly.  The van drives just like my car and most of the features are where they were in my car to.  I now have cargo space for groceries and the best part is I also have a clean car. I can even carpool now which I haven't been able to do since Madison came along. 

My husband informed me Saturday night that he was borrowing my car for a guy's night out.  I rolled my eyes.   He obviously has no issues driving my minivan. Yep, I am even getting possessive of my new car.  Rather than him driving everywhere when we go somewhere as a family, I keep the keys, at least for now. 

I may even already have a ticket in the mail since on the way home from the dealership, I was to busy admiring my new car and drove through the EZ-Pass lane crossing the border back into PA when I didn't have EZ-Pass in the car.

And I realized it is just a car.  One that has some pretty useful perks for our growing family.  Of course, let's hope I don't pass out from shock when I fill up the gas tank for the first time. That may take some getting used to.