Good News and Bad News

We bought a new car! Well, new to us. It’s a red 2008 Kia Sedona with less than 23K miles on it (though I’m sure we’ll be packing oodles more on it on our trips to and from Chicago).

It really seemed to fall into our laps too--even more than we were looking for and priced exactly in our budget. We had money earmarked and set aside for purchasing this car, and so we were able to pay for it in cash (which is a pretty complex feeling---part of you feels amazing that you won’t have any car payments, and another part of you is wildly shrieking at the thought of letting go of that amount of money for any reason, regardless of how worthy). At any rate, we feel like it’s just one more of the many blessings that seem to be raining from the sky lately.

So there you have it, we’ve officially joined the minivan brigade! My mom was ALWAYS driving a van---for as long as I can remember (OH WAIT---I do have fleeting memories of a gray station wagon with wooden side-paneling, but that’s another story). Maybe that’s the reason I’ve never felt any shame or reservations about owning a minivan---it’s just what moms tend to do. I'm fully embracing my Mom-ness. We’ve got to have somewhere to sit all of those screaming kids (and in a few years, all of their friends), don’t we?

Now for the lousy news. We’ve had this car for one week---ONE WEEK! Today after picking David up from preschool, my friend looks at the car and says, “Oooo, did you know about this scratch?” I looked down, and there was this ENORMOUS SCRATCH on it, complete with missing pieces of paint.


I was livid. At first I thought maybe, just maybe it had already been there and we missed it before buying it. But after talking to Steven, I knew that wasn’t right---we went over EVERY INCH of that car with a stinking magnifying glass, and it was perfect. And I KNOW that I would have felt it if I had scraped something that intensely—it’s a pretty good-sized scrape, and I’m not a careless driver.

So the only conclusion I can draw is that some lovely person clipped our car and decided that leaving a note was unnecessary. **Sigh. Thank goodness for no-fault insurance.