Roughing it

We sold my car today. It was my idea and it took Mike a little while to warm up to it, but we did it. It was a great car -- a black Honda Pilot with lots of bells and whistles. I'd imagined driving it until the wheels fell off or one of our children wrecked it in their early teenage driving years.

But truth is, it is serving us better by selling it because we're going to take part of our profit, buy an older car that will make do for a couple of years, and use the rest of the profit to pay off some bills that are hanging over our heads. Dave Ramsey would be so proud.

We sold it to CarMax, who gave us a decent offer, especially considering there were several smallish, but bothersome, things we would have had to fix ourselves before we could sell it to a private party. Once we had the tidy check from CarMax in hand, we drove right over to the bank to deposit it. That's where's things got a little inconvenient.

Because of the size of the check, they put a hold on it. Half will be available on Thursday. If they can get clearance from the CarMax bank, we could have access to all of the money yet this week. If not, it will be next week before we get access to it all. Which is ok. We only intend to spend 1/2 on a replacement car.

But that still means at least two days of being a 1-car, 5-person, 3-camp, 2-job, 2-residences family. And that feels like we're roughing it.

It took us about 20 minutes to figure out how to manage tennis camp, volleyball camp and Mike's business meeting tonight. Then, after he left, I realized I hadn't thawed out anything for dinner and I didn't have a car to go to the store. Technically, I could have walked to the grocery store. But I would have had to take the boys with me and I just wasn't up to the whining and complaining about the heat -- from me or them. Thank God for Donato's coupons!

I haven't even begun to think about how everyone will get where they are going tomorrow. Instead, I'm focusing on finding a car that Mike and I can both agree on. My standards are much lower than his, but I realize this is kind of an ego thing for him, even though I'm going to be the one driving it.

Even so, I'm giving us until Sunday to find and fall in love (or at least in like) with something. Because I can already tell we were not cut out to be a one-car family. Either that or maybe I'll give Mike a bus pass for Father's Day.