Every Mom's Best Friend

We have had so many cars I have lost count of them. Once day my husband and I started a tally and stopped around 19. I have heard the comment “you change your cars more than you do your underwear” more than once. Start talking about having the same car a year or two from now and my husband breaks out in a sweat.

Last March I was driving home from Castle Rock, when the car died on the side of a 75 mile an hour interstate. My oldest starts yelling that the trucks are going to run us over and the second one starts crying because we are lost and won’t get to eat anymore, and my third, unborn at the time, starts his afternoon aerobics on top of my bladder and I was acutely aware of how far away bathrooms are from the side of the interstate.

A few weeks later I was introduced to my best friend, my minivan. After we signed enough papers to kill three trees we were handed the keys and my anxiety went down as my husbands went up. Some of my fears about having a minivan have happened. For example the twenty something guy in the Camaro see’s right through me, however the 50 year old guy in the sedan will wink at me every now and again. Cars tend to switch lanes the minute they see me, but thats only because they have no clue that having a minivan does not mean you forget where the gas pedal is. Ask the friendly officers of Colorado Springs. They’ll tell you I still know my way around a gas pedal. My four year old’s shouts from the back “Eat my dust” and the three year olds echoing “I am speed” can also testify to the fact that my lead foot is still kicking.

My husband had the minivan last week. I suspect he has a secret bond to our little “Swagger Wagon” even though he tries to cover it up by loudly calling it choice names on the 27th of every month or throwing tools at it when he changes the oil. Anyway, as he pulled up to the mail box, a neighbor out watering his grass, says “great van.” My dear humble husband makes a full circle before looking back at the neighbor and pointing to himself with a confused look on his face. Later he tells me, “he had to have a vision problem.” My response was, “no, he probably has three children, three car seats, a diaper bag, a backpack, a stroller, a stuffed dog, three jackets, a bag of goldfish and 50 bank receipts and had to get groceries in his car.”

So on Tuesday’s when I am sitting in a long line of minivans, and my little four year old comes out of preschool carrying a huge paper painting of a leaf still dripping paint, and my three year old has insisted that every toy he owns wants to come along and my infant son is pulling his socks off and throwing them out the side of his car seat, and the groceries I just got are all nestled securely in the back of my “mommy car” I’m ok with 50 year olds winking at me. Because the mom over from me has a really nice car and may still get the 20 year old winks, but right now her kids are having a fist fight in the really nice backseat and there is wet paint smeared on the really nice window, and three bags of groceries just spilled on the ground.

My “partner in crime” got me to preschool in 8 minutes flat the other day. It held my child in time out at the park after he dumped 3 pounds of sand down his brothers back. It holds a lifetime supply of teddy grahams in the backseat. It rocks my sweet energizer bunnies to sleep as I run my 30 errands a day. I have no worry that I will be out and won’t have a sippie cup or a diaper, or Immodium, because somewhere in there, they are there.

I looked in my rearview mirror today and saw three of the world s cutest tiny faces smiling back at me and I thought, this is what I have always wanted to do and this is what I want to be!