The New Addition to Our Family

"How is it that someone who weights less than 6 lbs. makes soooo many major decisions in our life?"

This is the question Foster asked after Ava being home for less than a week. I told him he better get used to it, because she will be the reason behind most of our choices from here on out.

We waited till the last minute to get her car seat installed into the car. Call it superstition, call it procrastination, but it wasn't installed until AFTER I had her and she was in the NICU waiting to come home. When I plopped myself into the passenger seat on the Monday I was released, and my knees were in my nose, we realized very quickly that a Toyota Corolla was NOT the car for a growing family.

Last Sunday Foster, Ava and I started the process of looking for a new car. We have 3 cars with no car payments. 2 Corollas, and a 2006 Nissan Frontier truck that is my husband's baby. We had a slight problem. He didn't want to get rid of his truck, and we wanted to keep at least one of the Corollas because he drives almost 30 miles to work every day and you can't beat 40 mpg that the Corolla gets. So we only wanted to get rid of one of our Corollas.

We didn't know what kind of car we wanted. Did we want a station wagon, a mini van, SUV or a nice big sedan? I had to think that I will be watching JJ's son while she works so would need a large enough back seat to fit TWO car seats.

After looking Sunday and Monday, we were convinced that we wanted the Nissan Rogue. We love Nissans, and the Rouge was a nice SUV that got decent gas mileage. For the first time we were looking at having a car payment. This was not ideal for us because for one, I will only be working in January and then becoming a full time mom after that. I still have my photography, but that is not a guarantee steady income. Plus, we just don't like having a lot of debt, and would rather invest our money into retirement or something that can give us a return on our money, not a car that loses value as soon as we drive it off the lot. However, we had resigned to the fact that it was unavoidable this time around, because although we had a large downpayment, we could not afford to pay $20,000+ cash for a car. We had come up with a down payment, and the monthly payment we could afford, and then we headed out Tuesday to check out a few Rouges we had found nearby.

We were unimpressed by the Rouges we saw. A couple smelled like cigarette smoke, and one had a weird shake up front when we hit the brakes (and it was only a 2010!!). We started to head home when Foster wanted to stop by one more dealership. I had to feed Ava and change her diaper and as soon as I finished Foster came up to me SOOOOO excited! He found a Hybrid SUV that he wanted, and the price was completely reasonable. After talking it over with the salesman, doing some consumer reports research on one of their computers, talking him down a little on the price, and getting a quote on our trade in, we walked out with a new (to us) SUV and our out of pocket expense was LESS than what we were planning on putting down on the Rouge!!!

That's right! We STILL don't have a car payment!!! And THIS is our new car:

Saturn Vue Hybrid!!!