It Was Time

I know I have been a horrid blogger of late but I totally have a good excuse. If your significant other had been away for 6 months and finally came home, would you waste spend YOUR time blogging? Didn't think so.
So anyhow, he is out and about today so I thought I could squeeze a post in. There's really not too much new in these here parts. We have been thoroughly enjoying having hubby/daddy home with us again. Our sweet children put together a "date night" for mommy and daddy last night. The oldest came home for the weekend and cooked for us. Homemade Alfredo sauce with cut up chicken, fettuccine, green & yellow squash, broccoli, homemade rolls and salad. All very yummy! Jaquelyn set the table very nicely, complete with flickering candles and her playing the flute for us while we were eating (mood music I guess). All very sweet and we enjoyed it very much.
I suppose by now you have realized that we sent our oldest child off to college this month. In the process, she of course needed a vehicle of some sort. Well rather than take our chances with an unknown used car, that would be questionable at best considering the amount of money she had to spend, we decided to let her have our old Dodge minivan. She wasn't totally thrilled but since she only had to pay for repairs & such, she finally figured out she had no other choice was getting a great deal. So we had the mechanic check it over, fix the problems and put two new tires on it. Then I had her change the brakes & rotors and it was hers for $630. Pretty good deal if you ask me.






























Well this of course meant we only had one van and that would sooooo not work for us. Dan works about 1 1/2 hours from here and there is no bus service for the girls (private) school, so two cars are an absolute necessity. So....we had to break down and buy a vehicle. We did some research online and checked different dealerships and such out. We found several minivans but Dan was kind of hoping for not-a-minivan. We wanted something with good gas mileage but had to seat at least 6. Very hard to find these days if minivans are not preferred. (although I totally fell in love with two great Grand Caravans with stow & go seating!! I guess I'll have to keep that on my list for Santa) We finally found a vehicle that fit our needs at Carmax. We are the proud new owners of a 2006 Mazda 5. It is deep blue, seats 7, gets 22 city (can you say wow!)and 27 highway and the coolest part....it's a STICK SHIFT! So fun! We haven't owned a stick shift since Jaquelyn was born. The funniest part was when Dan took Taylor out driving. She took forever to realize it wasn't an automatic! I of course had to take pictures. She did not do terrible her first lesson but she didn't do too well either.