Choose Your Mode

...of transportation that is. The choo choo from the Transporation Museum we visited this morning, the Radio Flyer, or OUR NEW VAN!!! Hard to believe. Contrary to popular opinion (Veerman), we do not think we are too cool to own a van. We (I guess I should stop speaking for Mike) know I am cool, that is precisely why I am comfortable owning a van. :) It has been rather emotional though. For Olivia too - when we started this process a week ago and took the van for a test drive, she quit referring to my Ford as "Momma's car," and started calling it "my car." The day we drove it home she had a small melt down in the parking lot. (That could have been due to the fact that we were an hour past dinner time too.)

It's not so much the van that is the issue - because, truthfully, there is a reason why 90% of people with two or more children own one. It makes life a heck of a lot easier. We were squeezing both kids into car seats in a two door Explorer. I was constantly conking somebody's head on the door frame or the ceiling - including my own! The real issue is losing the stick shift. I have driven a stick since I was sixteen. My first car was actually a 1925 Nissan Sentra. Just kidding, it wasn't that old. But is was old. It wasn't a stick either, but my dad had a red, soft top Jeep Wrangler at the time (How wrong was that - for your dad to drive one of those and put his "I need to be cool" daughter in an old Nissan that didn't have a tape player so I had to ride around with my boom box in the front seat? But don't hear me complain because I didn't pay for the Nissan. I think we traded some chickens for it. JUST KIDDING. Good grief! I was appreciative.) Anyway, the Jeep was a stick and since my dad wasn't completely cruel he did teach me to drive it so I could take it to school a few times my senior year - especially the last day when all the seniors drove around the school honking and acting lame and all the under classmen watched admiringly out the windows. (Some traditions are so silly.) He taught me on a hill in our neighborhood that slanted about 90 degrees (or something, I'm not good spatially, but it was steep.) After about the third stall out I saw the look on his face change from, "Come on, I'll teach you how to do this. Sink or swim girl." to "Get out of my Jeep! I think you just dropped my transmission back on that hill!" A short time later I stalled through three changes of a red light. (In Amy Willis' car, Dad, not yours. Hope her dad isn't reading this.) The point is, I had to work hard to get this and every car since the Nissan was been a stick shift. So there it goes - an era. Though we are starting the new era in a similar vain with an old model. There is a tape player this time, but it is in the dashboard. Time to mature...unless anyone knows of a stick shift model minivan.