Waste of Space

I am sitting here in a quiet house in the middle of the day. That never happens, and when it does, I scramble to do whatever I can without interruptions. But not today. Connor and Hallie went across the street to play and I have already taken a pretty substantial nap. It's only 2:00. Thing is, I cannot get myself to do anything today (or for the past week). This pregnancy has been so very good, up until a few weeks ago. Now it just feels like I am in constant pain. Lots of pressure, back pain, etc. And if my past pregnancies give me any indication of when this one will come, I still have a good 4 weeks left. Ugh. I told Jared to put me in a coma for a month, but he just laughed. He could have at least looked into it for my sake. I feel like such a waste of space right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know 4 weeks is a relatively short time to have to be pregnant and this is my last time and I won't even remember how bad it was and look how good it was at the beginning and blah, blah, blah. But, my last month is miserable!

Where is that nesting instinct anyway? Here's what I've done to prepare: went downstairs and brought up a box of baby boy clothes, then left the box right by my bed, made a short list of meals I want to freeze, then bought some aluminum pans for the eventuality that I might ever make the said meals--that I don't have ingredients for anyway. And that's it. This is the point where I should be tearing apart and organizing every nook and cranny of my home because every pregnant woman knows that you can't bring a baby home if the linen closet is a bit messy, not to mention the baseboards or the inside of the oven. But here I sit alone in a house full of to do's and have no desire to do any of it.

The good news is that I fulfilled my only two New Year's Resolutions (I thought I'd be realistic this year): nail down the baby's name and buy a new car that would fit our family. The name part was fairly simple because we had already kind of decided on one when we found out it was a boy. But come New Year's, Jared said he wasn't quite sure about the name so we went through the top 500 boy names eliminating them for our various reasons and ended up with the exact name that we had before. I always feel like our babies kind of name themselves, like even though we'd never thought of the name before, we just know that's what the name should be.

The car issue was a bit more challenging. I began really searching at the beginning of January. I know there are plenty of 8 passenger cars out there, but I also know that there are a few 9 passenger cars as well. Even though we aren't planning on more kids, I just thought it would be nice to have one extra seat for a friend or family member, I mean as long as we were getting a new car anyway. Every time I went back to thinking about an 8 passenger mini-van or SUV, I just couldn't see us in it. And so many of them have no space at the back. Sure, I wouldn't take my whole family to Costco (I'm not that crazy), but I also didn't want to have to fold down the seats and move car seats just to fit a box of diapers in the back. A lot of them wouldn't even fit my single stroller, let alone the double one. So that left me with the Yukon XL or the Suburban. Originally I was searching for the Yukon, but just so you know, you can't do a search for "9 passenger vehicles" because it doesn't work that way. You have to click on each car's picture to see if it has the 9th seat (the bench in the front). I would say for every 50 cars I clicked on, only 1 would have the 9th seat. So frustrating. Finally, I started looking at Suburbans and found a few more 9 seaters than with the Yukons.

Once we began going to look at them, I felt like I was dating. Some of them just didn't feel right and some of them got sold before we even got to look at them. We called on what seemed like the perfect car and as we were getting off the freeway, they called back and said that someone just bought it. That dashed our hopes. And the guy who bought it was a smoker (ruining our car!--even though Jared tells me it was never actually ours). Then there was the one where the salesman acted so desperate. We were obviously not interested (because it just didn't feel right) when he said, "I'll take $500 off... What can I do to the car to make you buy it?" Um... take off 80,000 miles? He even called back to tell me that I shouldn't buy this other car that we were thinking about because he had looked at the Carfax for it and found some issues, that we already knew about. Seriously! This other salesman asked us to pay half of a repair that the car needed. So pay for something that we haven't even bought yet? No thanks. Where do these people come from anyway?

It was a very frustrating ordeal. I was a bit like a part time job doing this car search. I couldn't think of anything else. I would get online multiple times a day to see if anything new popped up. Finally, I found a Suburban on Thursday night and called to see if it was available. Jared and I went down right then and liked it. It was clean, had the 9th seat and even had a DVD player (something that wasn't on our list but that we knew our kids would love). It needed a small repair so the next day when it was done, we went down to buy it. It was stressful because there were other people on their way to look at it and one guy even offered to buy it over the phone. Sheesh. We traded in our van that night, for a very small trade in value. But, I was so happy to get rid of it. It was a great van, but it had been leaking steering fluid on our garage floor for years, even though we'd tried to get it fixed in the past. I did not want to sell it privately so I was overjoyed to have someone just take it off our hands for $1000.

The day after we bought the Burb, the check engine light went on. We called the dealer back and he said he would take care of it, which he did (catalytic converter?). The day after we got it back, the engine light went on again. The dealer was so nice to continue to work with us and not charge us anything. This time, they had it for over a week so they gave us a loaner car. I hated it! It was a Honda Pilot and it was just not the car for us. They fixed that problem (some timing issue?) and two days after that, guess what? The check engine light went on again. This time all that it required was a new gas cap. Even though all those issues kept popping up right after we bought it, I never felt bad about our decision. You know that kind of sick feeling you get when you know you've made the wrong choice? I never felt that way. Now I feel so grateful that the problems happened so soon after we got the car so that the dealer could just take care of it. And we do love our new (well, 2007) car. Our only problem now is that we can't fit both the Suburban and the truck in the garage at the same time (major first world problem). But, we can fit all of our kids, a stroller and a load of groceries in the car at the same time... and a friend, which is exactly what I wanted. So glad that process is over!

Now I just gotta get through this pregnancy...