Our new van

On the way to Cedar City for Christmas, our van broke. Luckily, we were only an hour away from home and we were able to make it back. My parents wanted us to be there for Christmas so badly that my dad drove all that night to come get us. We took our little Kia and between that and my parents' car, we fit us and all our stuff and drove on down to Cedar. We wasted $1075 getting the van fixed and then decided to just get a new van before our old one broke again (it had 185,000 miles and lots of things kept going wrong). We found a really good deal on a 2006 Toyota Sienna. It had about 18,000 miles on it and lots of cool features, like two side doors (I guess all vans have that nowadays, but our old one didn't), a power sliding door, 5-disc CD player, Sto-n-go seats (they fold down flat into the floor), stuff like that. So far, we really like it and we hope that it will last us a really long time so we don't have to go through the pain of buying a car again. That was our first time shopping for a new car--we've always just bought junkers from private parties because we happened upon good deals. Actually, I use the term 'we' loosely. I took Dalan, Elora, and Elias down to Salt Lake to look at vans that I found online, while Kydee was at school and Dale went to work. The prices were so good that I was afraid that they would be gone if we waited until Saturday when we could all go (it was Monday). I turned out to be right, because my first pick was sold already, but I found another deal that was very similar, so everything turned out ok. I just don't want to take three little kids car shopping all day again--well, maybe it was good, because the dealers didn't seem to want them to be there any longer than they had to, so they didn't waste time haggling and trying to sell me junk that I didn't want. Maybe next time I'll buy ice cream cones for the kids to hurry the salesmen up even more!