Since my last post we had a fabulous long weekend in DC with my mom celebrating Christmas after our canceled trip to Vermont (note to self: never fly through Philly in the winter).
We hit a lot of major DC attractions, but Tucker told me on the way home that his favorite part of the trip (after GoGo's Christmas presents) was the hotel's swimming pool, complimentary breakfast and the picnic he had on the floor of our room one night. He did have some epic breakfasts--one day he ate three pancakes, four sausage links, cereal and two cups of juice. The next day he finagled FIVE sausage links from me and a chocolate doughnut. The day that we went to the Air and Space museum, he was almost too distracted to enjoy the museum because he knew we had a cup of Fruit Loops in the stroller (which we only took out of breakfast that morning so that the kid would agree to leave his hour-long feast!).
Tucker loved seeing the dinosaur bones at the Natural History Museum--I think it cemented in his mind what dinosaurs are, and how big they are (he watches Dinosaur Train on PBS so he is beginning to really like dinosaurs). His favorite out-of-the-hotel activity was riding the carousel on the national mall, though.
Tucker has aged well in the past couple weeks and developed facial hair.
Enjoying Christmas with my mom.
But that is only part one of our recent adventures. We've been planning on getting a new car by the Spring, but the trip to DC made me get very serious about replacing my Civic with something bigger. With a stroller, a pack-n-play, two kids, a husband, all our bags and Christmas presents, we were simply busting out of the car. And that is without trying to fit the dog! Our criteria for a car was pretty simple: good mileage (over 20 mpg), three rows of seats, AWD, not a minivan, and (preferably) blue, red or green. Unfortunately, there is only one car that meets all those requirements in our price range (or at least what we wanted to spend): the Ford Freestyle.
As I was looking at Freestyles online, I found a low-mileage Freestyle (only 15,000 miles) in Annapolis. Our area of Virginia suffers from a severe dearth of Freestyles, so neither of us had actually even looked inside a Freestyle much less driven it when we trudged up to Annapolis to potentially buy the car. But it was the perfect car on paper, so it was worth a try.
While Molly gazed adoringly at Tucker at Austin's parents' house in Annapolis (see below) we went out to brave the used car lot. After getting worked up all week about the bargaining process, it was actually splendidly simple. A family friend who knows cars better than us checked it out with us, he declared it a great car. Then we told the guy inside the empty dealership we liked it and what could he do for us? He said he could do $1100 off the list price. We were just about speechless as the list price was already really good and we would've paid full price if necessary. So Austin stammered something about replacing the two back tires which are showing a little wear. The salesman said no. So Austin said he'd pay him cash right now if he would do $1300 off. And it was done. It took approximately two minutes.
Our new car
Bonus pictures of Molly
