this woman’s work

Cars

Jul 15, 2002 The Story of My Life

I’m writing on deadline today but I also have the house to clean and my son to raise. Not much time for a thoughtful blog entry but I’ll try to squeeze something in.

Our big news is that we bought a new car. To be exact, we bought a minivan. I love minivans. I know, I know, how uncool is that? But I do. Despite my current infertility, I am planning on having another kid or two and so space is a nice thing. It’s also good for hauling around the jogging stroller, Noah’s bike, the dog, and sundry other recreational items. We bought a ‘93 Ford Aerostar. Old Betsy has us convinced that American built cars don’t bite as much as always thought they did. Our ‘89 Honda dropped it’s transmission; Old Betsy is still trundling on.

Brett researches things thoroughly before committing to them so he had spent the night before diligently reading through the CarTalk website and doing Google searches. When we were at the car lot, he was asking the (surprisingly and pleasantly low-key) salesman about the car and then he turned to me and said, “What do you think?”
“Whatever you say,” I answered. “I trust you.”
He gave me a pained look. He doesn’t like to have all that responsibility in case the car explodes tomorrow and I blame him.
“But do you think this is a good idea? Do you think it’s a good car?” he asked.
“It’s blue,” I said. “I like blue.”
And we got the car.

I love it. It’s blue, it’s big, there’s room for Noah to have a real booster seat and now he can see out the window. He can also open the window himself (it doesn’t have power windows but Noah can reach his very easily) and a little radio controller so he can adjust the volume. Needless to say, Noah loves it, too.

We celebrated by going to the county fair. Noah rode all the little kid rides and then we rode the Scrambler as a family. That’s how Noah said it when he called Grandma, “As a family, we rode only one ride. That was the Scrambler.” Noah played a game of darts and won a Pokemon mirror. He’s never seen Pokemon but he loves it. Strange. He had a lemon shake-up and an elephant ear. At first he said no to the ear because he thought it was made of real elephants. He was relieved to find out that it was a flat donut. A good time was had by all.

Last night I met up with an experienced homeschooling friend whose values are very similar to my own. It was awfully reassuring. Her kids are terrific. Smart and funny and confident, everything you want your child to be. You know how some kids just radiate all of the love that their family has given them? These kids radiate like crazy. She’s an unschooler.

Personal pet peeves about the homeschooling community (these are generalizations about the community, not individual homeschoolers so please save your hate mail):