Eight Years.

Well, we made it eight whole years without having to go there. But now we have . . . a second car. [Cue music. Whatever kind seems appropriate. :)]

You can read all about our good fortune to live so happily with just one car by clicking on the following sentence. We've been so happy and lucky to share a car!

Like I wrote before, it's been pretty amazing how our circumstances keep lending themselves so well to sharing a car. And it's also been SO rewarding to share our schedule to the extent you need when you only have one vehicle. We've loved it.

Lately we've been considering our various options now that:
1) A second baby is coming.
2) Seth is in his last year without school.
3) Matt is finishing his last year of roaming from hospital to hospital, soon to be working exclusively at Children's just three miles away.

The first two say to us, break down and get a car. The third says, HA! Yeah right! Three miles away means NO second car required! HaHA!

Which is absolutely totally true, and resulted in a firm decision to work out another plan. We'd still share the car. For the days when taking Dad to work would mean waking two kids up at 5:30 in the morning, we'd get Matt a scooter. It's a safe route for a scooter, and a lot safer than a bicycle would be, and would take much less time than riding a bus or walking the three miles. Scooter it was.

Then we started to get real about our Camry.

The awesome, awesome Camry. It's been with us our whole marriage, and with me before then (and my dad before then!). "The Crammy" (as my roommates affectionately named it when it was how we all got to grocery stores :)) has been a great car for 11 years and almost 200,000 miles. And it's still a great car. (Consider, too, that it was severely beaten for many years by snow and ice and snow-clearing things like sand, gravel, and salt! This car rocks!) But it's starting to demonstrate that if we keep putting this kind of mileage on it . . . it's on its last legs. :-(

It occurred to us: with this kind of use, we'll need to buy a new car in the next year or two anyway. May as well do it now and have two cars, right? And if the Crammy is only asked to drive three miles to Children's hospital and back every day, how long might it last...? Another five years? More? (That would be SWEET!!!)

So in an effort to be reasonable, and in a dramatic effort to possibly lengthen the life of our awesome old-man of a sweet car, we decided on Thursday to start—to start—looking at vehicles. The beauty being we were in absolutely no rush and could wait months for a great deal.

On Saturday we looked at cars just to get a preliminary feel for things.

And on Monday...we drove a new car home.

Hahahahahaha!!

Turns out that being in no rush with the flexibility to wait for a great deal gives you a killer position during negotiations to get the great deal. And you end up with a car in two days anyway! Kind of funny.

But Matt had a good time negotiating from his killer "I don't need this" position, and Seth had a great time test-driving cars (happiest day of his life :)), and we ended up with a 2009 Kia Rondo. It only has 20,000 miles on it but we got it for almost half the price of a 2010. And it's a Certified Pre-Owned vehicle, which means we keep the great 100,000-mile and 60,000-mile Kia/Hyundai warranties. All in all, it worked out pretty well! We love how the car drives, and we love that it has so much more space without being a van or an SUV or a big car (it's footprint is smaller than the Camry's, but it has seven seats that actually feel more spacious, and tons of cargo room!). It gets great reviews. Hopefully it can last as well as we expect it to after having a killer Toyota for so long.... (Oh, Kia, they say you're pretty decent now. You better be! I guess even if you're not, we got you for cheap. ;))

So, goodbye you fabulous eight years of shared-car bliss! We never thought we'd get that much of you. Thanks to good fate and a good car, you stretched out to almost a decade. I guess that's pretty awesome.

(Watch, the Crammy will die tomorrow, and our car-sharing will be back! Haha!)