I'm now a mini-van mom. We're a mini-van family. Our big white 15 passenger van that we had affectionately named Charlotte all those years ago is no longer with us. We sold it. We sold it to the company Wayne works for. For the time being she's making her home in Missouri - hauling construction workers from job site to job site. I feel sad. But I'm okay with it too. Charlotte was with us for many years. We all have many memories that include her. We took many trips in that van, packed lots (and lots) of stuff in its depths, hauled kids & grandkids and kids' friends, along with everyones gear (with room to spare) --- we loaned it out to the church youth group several times for road trips. It's the van that Colter broke his foot in when he was about four, it was pulled over many times by the police because, even though it was a big ol' van, it could speed down the highway quite impressively, and with the back seats removed everything from motorcycles to lumber to pieces of furniture had been hauled from place to place many times. Its the van most of our girls learned to drive in, my skinny teen girls learned to maneuver it around parking spaces and busy traffic as though it were a small car, a few of them even learned to parallel park it practically perfect, something I'm not even sure Wayne could do! Oh, we loved Charlotte for many reasons, but we also disliked her for many reasons. Mainly, she was a pig on gas. And with a family our size, she was always on the road, back and forth to town picking up kids, dropping off kids, running here and there, several times a day. She was starting to mess with our paycheck way too much with all those daily trips into town. More and more often I found myself making a trip into town with only one or two children in the van and we began to think that we needed to be more practical. And, with the price of gas, it was getting more of a stretch to take trips with her. And so we began looking around. And thinking. And then one day Wayne came home from work and said he sold it to his company. And we had a week to find another vehicle. And after several days of looking around and making inquiries and keeping our fingers crossed, we became owners of a red mini-van. It's a chevy, of course. Because Wayne will have nothing that isn't of General Motors persuasion. It's lots smaller. And we've had to be creative when fitting in both grocery bags and kids at the same time. But on these below-freezing mornings it warms up in just a matter of minutes and it's a breeze to scrape off the frosty windows. And oh how I love looking down at the gas gauge to see that the needle has barely moved during the half dozen trips into town and back home again on any particular day. It was a wise choice for us, even though there have been several times that we've wished that we had Charlotte back again and several times we've had to car pool with two or three family vehicles rather than all of us riding together. We've named our mini-van, Jude. Because thats what we do - we name things. And there's a very cool story and reason why we named the van Jude. But it's a story I'm not sure most people would understand. So to keep it short and simple, it's named in honor of St. Jude. And it makes me smile every time I think about it.
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And on one of the days Wayne, Colter and Wayne's dad were out looking for a mini van, the two little girls and I were stuck at home. We still had errands to run and so we had to drive Brandon's pick-up (which Wayne had been working on/fixing for him) and the little girls thought it was so fun to do that (proving that it doesn't take much to entertain them!) So we had to take pictures of us in it. We set the camera on the dash and used the self timer, not exactly sure what it was aiming at...
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