My cool rating is about to drop a few points

not that it was exceptionally high these days anyway.

Today after school, the kids and I will begin the task of cleaning out my car, which lets face it, is quite an undertaking.  Right now I drive a Trailblazer Extended.  When we bought it, it was love at first sight.  It is a pretty glittery red, it has leather seats and the front ones are heated, it was loaded with a 6 disc CD player, premium sound, every airbag possible and a DVD player.  I LOVED that car and it was perfect when we had three kids, but now, not so much.  The middle row has three seats and the back row two.  We just fit since it seats seven, and the babies are on either end of the middle seat, Brittan sits between the two car seats, Grayson is in the back in booster and Haven is next to him.  To say we are cramped is a major understatement, and trips are a nightmare with the stroller taking up the precious cargo space in the back, the kids in the back row riding with the pack and play under their feet and all our luggage that I carefully pack to keep it to a minimum gets put in a luggage bag on the roof.  To be honest, it kind of sucks.  Kids are jammed in and uncomfortable.  When it rains or snows, the kids in the back have to step on the seat and climb over leaving mud on Brittan's seat and soon, when we move Finn up to a convertible seat, I have no idea how they will get in or out of the truck.  The final straw was the car started having problems, lots of problems including a weird ABS issue that caused us to have to disable the ABS or pay thousands to fix it.

The Trailblazer is set to be paid off in November and we had planned to give it a year and then suck it up and buy something bigger, but with the brake issues and two big trips coming up, I decided to start looking around last week.  I found a Ford E350 that has only 20K miles on it and was in our price range.  I decided to call and start the credit process just to see how it played out, and well, it played out well and actually will cost us about 200 dollars less a month and we will have a warranty that will last through 100K miles.  So, we will clean out the car today and tomorrow evening we will go take a look at the big ole 12 passenger van and I am guessing it will come home with us.  While I am excited to stretch out, have a warranty and generally feel safer driving on the upcoming trips, I am sad that we will have a car payment for longer and that I will now be the mom driving the HUGE church van around town!  Ryan is a bit dismayed at the whole thing, but we have found some really sweet flame decals we are thinking of putting on the van, you know, to make it easier to find :)

So no more cute little cars for me, not even the usual "mom" ride of a minivan, nope, we are going for the big, embarrassing and totally uncool car, but man will it be nice to be able to separate the kids when they are fighting!