Solved the crime and bought a car

This week the kids only went to the babysitter twice. Monday and Wednesday we were able to stay at home aside from Nadia going to her last gymnastics class on Monday night with Paul and the kids going to AWANA while I was at choir on Wednesday night. I was glad we had those two days to stay at home in light of having a busy weekend.

This morning the kids and I were out the door around 8:15 to head to Saturday Science. They hold seven of those each semester (fall/spring), and today was the last one. It was my first time attending as Paul had taken them the last two times. Today's program was very creative. They had written a story about a "crime" (a student stealing tests out of the professor's mailbox), and we had to go through different stations to analyze handwriting, measure the footprints, analyze fingerprints, do a fiber analysis with an electron microscope, etc. There were eight suspects, and Nadia and I correctly figured out who was guilty! The program took three hours. I took photos today, and then I went on their Facebook page

(through Paul's FB account) and downloaded some photos they had posted of our kids the last two weeks.

On Thursday when  I was meeting with a student teacher in the same town as Susquehanna University, I noticed that at the mall they were having "Superhero Saturday." I looked up information online and decided to have the children bring costumes so we could stop in the mall after the science program. If they were in costume, they would each get a free kid's meal at Garfield's (a sit down restaurant). My lunch cost about $7.50 and all three of their meals were free! We stopped at the library and then finally arrived back at home sweet home. I was going to mow the lawn, but Paul had accidently taken the shed keys with him to work. He got home a few hours after we did because in addition to going to work, he drove down to a Honda dealer in Reading to buy a car. Throughout our marriage we've always owned either Hondas or Toyotas. In fact every car I've owned for the past 30 years has been a Toyota. We did buy a Honda Civic once during our marriage; it was Paul's car until we bought the van in 2012. The Prius then became his car after Oliver was born because three car seats didn't fit in the back of a

Prius. We were planning to trade Paul's car in for something newer in about six months. His car had 166K miles on it. But it failed the inspection on Tuesday, and to pass the inspection (his sticker expired the end of May), we would have had to spend $500 to repair the muffler. We didn't think it was wise to invest $500 more into a car if we were planning to trade it in within a few months, especially as we knew we weren't likely to get much for it because Paul had hit two dead deer with it over the past couple of years. The first time the damage was more significant and we had it repaired, but the second time he just removed the broken front grill. So the car always has a check engine light on (and burns through oil faster than it used to/should), has a hole in the muffler, and is missing the front grill. So I said we should probably try to replace it next month. Paul started doing research on cars and decided to get a Mazda, and he went and bought one today! He would have bought one yesterday except he forgot to bring the title with him to work, and I had a Family Math Night to attend last night that my students were putting on in an elementary school. It's a 2016 and has only 17,000 miles on it. Hopefully we will get many years out of it! It's a bit bigger than the Prius so hopefully the three kids can ride it in more comfortably when needed. Nadia is very disappointed that it is grey - just like our minivan. She doesn't understand that color is not the most important factor to us. So we have two grey vehicles even though Nadia and I are not keen on the color. Oh well. As long as the car is safe, reliable, reasonably priced, and gets decent gas mileage, I am okay with it. Hopefully whenever we replace the van (hopefully not for a few more years), we can get a vehicle that is a color Nadia and I like.