I’ll let you in on a little secret: our minivan isn’t sexy. It’s not nimble, it doesn’t whisper on the highway, and it definitely isn’t fuel-efficient. Our hand-me-down minivan is the furthest from a sexy ride that you can get.
When I traded my 80’s sports car, for the minivan, I was both excited and melancholy. Gone were my days of cruising sans t-tops; blaring mixed-tapes into the stratosphere. However, the stereotyped soccer mum was alluring. Who doesn’t want to be that mum whom, while holding tea, opens the sliding door to let her children and dog bound onto a field?
The reality of minivan ownership isn’t far off soccer mum. There are cup holders for my tea – eight total. And the side door does indeed slide open to let my daughter and dog bound onto fields.
Fitting my ‘children’ into the minivan came with a lot of swearing though. It was like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to figure out how to install, first, an infant Graco bucket-style carseat, then a Britax forward-facing carseat, and finally, one Graco and one Britax onto the two benches provided. Somewhere along the line, we removed the middle bench for maximum ease of movement.
How do people with more carseats do it? With two children and a dog, I find myself wishing for a bigger car. But re-living the 8-seater A-Teamesque van my parents owned is not a dream of mine.
What had become a dream was finding a new radio, mostly for cosmetic reasons. Ever since our toddler fed pennies to the tape deck last February, “I’m getting money, Mama,” our minivan looked like it was missing a tooth: the black hole where the radio once lived, another strike against our aged vehicle.
Yes, we were too cheap to replace it. But we also didn’t really need it, or so I thought. There had been numerous drives to my husband’s hometown, 7 to 12-hours away, depending on if you have or don’t have kids, when we didn’t listen to any music. An old married couple, if you will.
We lived radio-less until Thanksgiving, when Grandpa remedied the circuit board, rid the radio of the putrid electrical smell and re-installed it. He also fixed the passenger window, that wouldn’t shut properly.
Dang. The sliver, and I do mean minute sliver, of hope that our ticking vehicle would be traded up for a purring 2010 model vanished.
This afternoon, cruising with my two girls, husband and dog, I watched my two-year-old groove to the music and my husband’s jaw twitch as I sang. Ownership of our unsexy minivan was suddenly worth its weight in gold.
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