Wheels

I'm happy to report that by last Friday we were once again a 2-car family. I didn't really have much of an opinion about what kind of car we bought, other than it had to be within our price range (read: cheap) and had to be able to at least get all 5 of us to church.

Mike, on the other hand, had some very definite ideas of what he would accept as a new-to-us car. First, he started looking at vintage Mercedes automobiles, which I quickly nixed. If either us knew a thing about fixing cars, I might have at least pretended to entertain the idea. But since we don't, I didn't.

Then he moved on to Mercedes and BMW wagons. "Nope. Too flashy," I protested.

When he started looking at Volvo wagons, I could live with that. Solid. Well-built. Safe. Classy but not ostentatious. A Volvo I could live with (and I have -- we've had two other Volvos in the almost 17 years we've been married).

We found 4 Volvo wagons we were willing to look at. One sold before we could get there. I test drove one that had low miles for its age, but was pretty beat up and only blew cool-ish air from the air conditioner. Not a good thing for a black with black interior car on a 90-degree day. The third was being sold by a dealer in another city that had an "F" rating from the Better Business Bureau. The fourth, however, was a good fit. It had a few more miles than I'd hoped for, but is in pristine condition and had obviously been babied:

So far, it's been a good car. We're taking a few days to get used to it before we give it a name.

Now, I'm not really in the practice of naming inanimate objects. (Well, other than my elliptical, Denzel.) But we started naming our cars when we owned two minivans. We couldn't tell the kids to "go get in the van," because there were two of them. So they were named "the fire truck" (the red van) and "the police car" (the silver van). When we sold the fire truck, we bought the Honda Pilot, which was quickly christened "the black speedy."

Now we have this navy blue Volvo wagon and it only seems fitting that she has a name, too. I've decided its a "she" because she has cargo space in the back and women do a fine job of carrying things inside them (i.e., babies, grudges, etc.).

One wouldn't think it would be too hard to come up with a name for a Volvo. After all, my children all have names that can be found in the "Volvo Names" section of the Beyond Jennifer and Jason baby names book. (For the record, according to the book, Volvo names are classic and never go out of style.)

The names that we've tossed around include Blue Betty, Madame Blueberry (a nod to the Veggie Tales) and a few others that I can't recall right now.

But I do remember, quite vividly, that Charlie was trying to play off the word Volvo and suggested that we name the car "Vulva." I tried very hard to keep a straight face as I explained that a vulva is the name for lady parts. So we quickly moved on to Vivian, which I'm actually fond of.

Maybe this weekend we'll take a family vote and name this little lady once and for all.