My POS Van

For anyone that's read my blog you know Hubby and I fought the minivan for a long time. But after we bought it we wondered why we waited so long. The cup holders, the sliding doors, the DVD player. They were all wonderful.

Now 2 years later, we can't wait to trade it in. The DVD player quit working at least 6 months ago, we replaced our front tires around Thanksgiving, every oil change came w/ other diagnoses, our transmission slips every now and again, and this past weekend we blew a rear tire on Interstate.

When the whole transmission started slipping a few months ago we thought about looking for something else. But we've really been trying to stick to our budget since the beginning of the year and decided to wait it out. We had the transmission cleaned/flushed, whatever it is they do to it and that helped w/ the slipping but hasn't stopped it completely.

After the blowout this past weekend, we took it as a sign.


If the loan goes through the way we believe it will, this will be our new car. It's a 2009 Chevy Traverse w/ leather interior, DVD player, tinted windows, remote start, heated seats, and AWD. We're sad about losing the sliding doors and most of the cup holders that the van had, but excited about losing the minivan look, the working more compact DVD player and the fact that it isn't white! 

I'm Addicted to Caffeine

My sister-in-law has to have a Diet Pepsi first thing in the morning. The thought of pop before noon was not appealing to me. 

Nowadays I can't get thru lunch w/o my Coke Zero. Sometimes I have one while making supper too. 

And Sonic Happy Hour is a great thing. 

And the .99 large drinks before 10 AM. 

I'm really a closet Sonic junkie. There I said it. 

It's gotten out of hand, seriously. 3 or 4 days of the week we make a Sonic stop. Whether it's in the morning or after school it varies. 

It's so bad I'm worried the car hops know my car and talk about me after they deliver my drinks. I don't want to be the pathetic mom in the minivan who stops every day. 

But sometimes I'm craving a large fountain pop. 

Fighting the Soccer Mom Stereotype

Even before Hubby and I got married we agreed on one thing: We didn't want to own a minivan.

After our first child, we bought an SUV. A Chevy Equinox and we loved it. It suited our needs perfectly. We had a child and a dog. Both sat comfortably in the backseat. Spacious back end for all our baby stuff. (We do a lot of traveling to see family and friends.)

When our 2nd child came along we were still riding pretty in our SUV. It was a little tougher to fit everything in the back end but we made it work. Our dog had to ride on the floor which he wasn't crazy about but again, we made it work.

My father-in-law is a car dealer so we're always checking out the lot when we're visiting them. This past summer we spotted a minivan sitting on the lot. Every fiber in our body was screaming: No! It's a minivan! But we were planning another baby and knew we needed something bigger.

Sure we could have gone w/ a suburban or an SUV w/ a 3rd row seat. If only we could afford a GMC Acadia or Saturn Outlook. (Those are my dream family cars.) Unfortunately, the later 2 were too new for our budget and any suburban w/in our price range had too many miles on it.

The minivan on the lot was a Chevy Uplander, 2008. It had leather seats, great mileage, automatic doors, the back row of seats folded down and best of all it had a DVD player.

The only downside was: It was white.

It might not seem like a big deal to everyone else, but Hubby and I aren't big fans of white vehicles. Hubby drives a white pickup and having 2 white vehicles? We didn't like it. This was our biggest dilemma. Not the fact that we were breaking our #1 rule of not owning a minivan. Not that we would be cementing our status as a family living in the suburbs and me as a soccer mom, but that the van was white.

We've owned that van for 8 months and I love it. I love the automatic doors, the DVD player, how far I can go on a tank of gas, and all the cup holders.

No matter how much I love it though, Hubby and I still talk about how much we wish it wasn't white.