I'm not a minivan person. Now before you get all huffy and puffy because you yourself ARE a driver of aforementioned terrible car, I'm not saying I dislike minivans (ok, so maybe I am just a little bit) (or their owners) I'm just NOT a minivan girl. Never have been.


It has come to our attention that A) our lease is up in December and B) another child will simply not fit into our current smallish SUV- unless we put them in the trunk or on the floor.

Thus begins the car shopping (and dreaming). In my dreams I would wake up and find a brand new Range Rover sitting in my driveway. But then again, it too is a little small for this multiplying-like-rabbits family of mine. So I suppose it would be a..hmmm...maybe a Cadillac Escalade. The ones with a third seat. This would satisfy our seating requirements, my coolness factor requirement, and of course the American made requirement.

In reality, I am ok with ANY car that is a humongous gas guzzling eight seater that is NOT a minivan. Brian tends to disagree. Strongly. He feels it is somehow my duty as a stay at home mom with a gaggle of children to drive a no-good-horrifically-ugly-social-life-killer around town. He claims that if people stop being my friends (Yes, I used this as an excuse. So?) due to the type of wheels parked in our driveway that they're not worth being friends with anyways. But what if I stop being friends with me?! What happens then?

During a recent (heated) minivan vs. anything else debate, Brian said to me, "You can have a brand new fully loaded minivan of your choosing or you can have a seven year old Yukon." Um, Yukon. Was their even a choice in that proposition?

He now pulls out minivan fun facts like it's his newfound job.

'Honey, you could have doors that open with a push of a button.' My arms aren't broken. Thank you, but the ability to open a door isn't my problem.

'Babe, we would have so much storage.' I don't even carry a diaper bag. What do we need to store? And besides, have you seen the Yukon XL's trunk?!

'It will be so much easier to buckle the babes into the third row in a minivan.' Listen. I'm the one that will be doing the majority of the buckling. Let me deal with it...in a Suburban.

The larger problem in this situation is that ALL the people I thought for certain would be on my side have turned against me in some kind of minivan coup. My own mother for crying out loud. Who, by the way, had to drive around the worst kind of minivan of all for a few years of her life- the kind with advertisements and writing on the sides. Instead of claiming it was absolutely the lowest point in her life she reminisced fondly and told me, get this, DRIVING A MINIVAN IS ACTUALLY A LOT OF FUN. My father must have drugged her during those years because she must have forgotten what social suicide it was to be dropped off at parties in the US Ice Sports Complex minivan. Oh the horror.

Then my in-laws turned on me. Although, I should have seen that coming as they did CHOOSE to drive around an Astro minivan AFTER all their children had left the nest. But my friends?! How could you? To suggest that "they're not that bad" and "you'd look cute behind the wheel of an Odyssey" made me puke a little.

Is there anyone out there on my side?! Does anyone get where I'm coming from?! Maybe you should decide. In honor of the minivan debate I have started the very first ever Meek Twins poll- to minivan or not to minivan. That, of course, is the question...

Posted by Brooke* at Thursday, June 11, 2009 |