Big Blue

It's official. Our family can fit in one car once again! Before little Luke came along, we fit just fine in our Dodge Grand Caravan. However, despite all of its great features that served us well (and continue to be very convenient) these past five years, the van's one flaw is the small fact that it only seats seven people. We knew we needed to get something larger, and had been putting it off as long as possible. Neither one of us loves car shopping, and both of us love not having a car payment :) Necessity won out, though, and we finally found a Suburban with enough miles to make it affordable and enough seats to fit our family plus one! It's a 9-passenger Suburban with three rows of bench seats, including the front row. As it turns out, the flat front bench seat is a very handy spot to change a newborn!

In case you're wondering, you can fit six car seats in the back of a Suburban!


We're getting used to driving a bigger, taller, more gas-thirsty car. We kept the van, too, which means that Matt and I can both fit more than a few kids in our cars if need be on a daily basis. This is purely handy right now, but definitely essential as we rapidly approach the years of shuttling our own kids and other kids around for a million activities. In the meantime, the van is a good baseball gear schlepper as well :)

The license plate BIGBLUE would be a very appropriate one for this beast of a car. Many eons ago -- okay, maybe just 9 years ago, but it feels like lifetimes ago -- we were a kid-free, fancy-free couple who bought a brand-new little blue Acura that was the perfect baby blue color. I ordered the license plate BBIBLUE for that little baby of ours, mostly because of a catchy George Strait song by the same name and because we apparently had money to burn. BBIBLUE proved to be a source of irony as we brought pink baby after pink baby home :) As nice as that car was, it was not meant to stay with our family for very long, with its little back seat and sporty ways. We sold it before Mary was born, bought Matt's little green commuter car and pocketed the difference. Little did we know that a real baby blue would eventually make his way into our family ;)

BBIBLUE's cousin Big Blue seems like a keeper so far. Something tells me this car will see our family through many adventures!