say hello to the newest minivan mom

You read that right. I'm the world's (or at least San Pedro's) newest owner of a minivan.  A few years ago, I wouldn't be too proud to admit this, but after years of one car living (in a not very large car at that) the 'we need a minivan' bug finally hit us.  And once you give into that idea, you realize how great minivans are for young families! Before I tell you the story, here is a picture of our fabulous new addition - a 2011 Honda Odyssey!!

Okay, we didn't just wake up one morning last week and decided to purchase this for fun.  We've been thinking, planning, saving, talking about, occasionally test driving, and doing even more saving for about a year now.  We are not impulse, emotion buyers. :)

In recent weeks we realized we had finally saved nearly all of the amount to purchase the 2011 Honda Odyssey - our number one choice.  However, we also started toying with the idea of purchasing a used Honda minivan for various reasons.  We test drove used vans and they also seemed like a viable option.  By this point, I really didn't care too much anymore if we got the brand new or a good used van - I just thought we needed one soon! 

This past Thursday, Landon woke up discussing the idea that we might just wait until we got to Ohio to purchase our minivan.  Since the natural disasters in Japan, the inventory of new Odysseys has been quite short and finding exactly what we would want to purchase in our local area has been difficult. We were starting to check out more and more used vans when - after a day of Landon taking lots of phone calls in private and "running errands" quite a bit - he tells me to get the kids ready to grab a quick bite to eat out for dinner.   I get us ready, Landon comes home, but then says 'Wait a minute. I'm going to run the shopette, be right back.'   Okay, so I wait again.  But I decided to wait outside and as I'm getting ready to put the kids in the car, here comes Landon driving up our street in the brand new Odyssey!

Basically, I freaked out.  This purchase that we had been discussing and planning for more than a year, this purchase that I was starting to think wouldn't come about for some time, suddenly had materialized on my doorstep!  I was so excited - and to top it off it had a big red bow like all those car commercials at Christmas time.  It was such a funny, wonderful surprise and as Landon told me the story of how it came about, I realized how much he had been throwing me off the trail to truly make this a complete shock!

We've had it for a few days now and we love it!  It has leather, a back-up camera, a DVD player (a MUST, especially for our big move to Ohio coming up in two weeks), and a dozen other cool features that impress us (since we don't buy new cars very often - this is only our second - these new features easily impress us!:)  But our favorite feature so far is the Bluetooth sync feature. Basically, our phones are synced with the vehicle and when we make calls from the minivan, we use the speakers to speak and listen - completely hands free and easy.  Very cool!

But my favorite thing about the minivan is that after months and months of saving for it, we paid for it in full.  Of course, we've been fortunate enough to get by easily with our one car thanks to the bus system that takes Landon to the base and back, which afforded us the ability to wait and save up.  But it feels good to say that we OWN the van outright. Makes all those months of waiting (which perhaps were harder for me than for him I think!) worth it. 

Welcome to the family, Mini!