If I had to pick one word to sum up what it was like to get ready for Kate when we were expecting her in 2007, it would be "expensive." I realize there are prettier, more motherly words. But the truth is that getting all the stuff you need for a baby in the modern age is like being on a weird retail scavenger hunt for crib bedding and bouncers and pacifiers, and it adds up. I know that a lot of this is due to the fact that we don't really need all of this stuff, but when you're expecting your first baby it feels like you do.

So when I was pregnant with Isaac, Dan and I could not stop commenting to one another how great it was that we already had all the stuff we needed. Aside from a bassinet for the swanky nursery we prepared for him in our walk-in closet and baby boy clothes we were given by sweet friends and family, we needed almost nothing. At least not for the house.

The car was a different story. When Kate was born, Dan and I switched cars. I took his blue four-door Saturn and he got my silver Nissan Sentra, a car that was great for commuting but not so great for a car seat. In making this trade, Dan was doing a very sweet thing. The Saturn is much more comfortable. It's bigger, and the Nissan is tiny. When you consider that Dan is a big guy, the sacrifice is even more apparent. I am not sure I have ever seen anything more noble than my sweet, extremely tall husband folding himself into that little car every day to go off to work so that Kate and I could ride in space and safety to the park and the zoo -- but it was also kind of a comical sight. His head almost touched the ceiling.

This arrangement was fine until Isaac was born, and then we had a problem. When all four of us are in the Saturn, Dan usually drives. This means that the driver's seat has to be put allllll the way back, too far to allow for a rear-facing car seat behind it. That wasn't so hard; we just moved Kate's forward-facing seat behind Dan, and while it gave her a really good vantage point from which to kick Dan's seat incessantly, it worked. Then we put Isaac's car seat behind my seat, and, well, the results were less than great. I am not nearly as tall as Dan, but I'm not short either. Basically I had to move my seat so far forward that my knees were almost touching the dash in order to install Isaac's car seat at the right angle. You add a diaper bag and the inevitable pile of stuff that accumulates in the cars of people with small children, and we pretty much looked like we were falling out of a clown car every time we got somewhere.

We were willing to try to make this set up work for the sheer beauty of the fact that both of our cars, while small, were paid off. It's hard to beat no car payment. We agreed that we would keep the Saturn as our main family car through the end of 2010, and would start looking for a larger car then. Thus began the conversations about what we should buy after that.

From the get-go, it was clear we had a problem. I was pretty strongly of the opinion that the only purchase that made sense for us in light of the fact that we now have two kids and could have more was a minivan. It's not like I was happy about this. I realize that a minivan is the height of unsexy pragmatism. But I am now at a place in life that makes an insulated lunch bag a more practical accessory than a cute purse. The ugly purse I do own has Band-Aids, hand sanitizer and 62 receipts from Chik-Fil-A in it all the time. Unsexy Pragmatism is my home address. While I have been making my peace with that, I have scoped out a lot of minivans in the zoo parking lot. Yes, they are ugly. But that whole thing where you click with the keys and the doors just open by themselves? That is magical. That makes me misty-eyed just thinking about it. I heart that.

Dan, of the two of us, is actually the more practical one most of the time. So I was shocked when we totally did not agree with me about the gloriousness of minivans. Not only didn't he agree with me, he flatly refused to consider owning a minivan. Started going around telling people how he was not under any circumstances going to be buying a minivan. Kept talking about how we could just buy an SUV with a third row instead. To which I was like "And then what? We can throw our third kid over the bench seat and just see what happens?" Nothing. He was not having it.

Apparently, back in high school, Dan drove his parents' old minivan and Hated. It. I say it was their old minivan because at one point they owned two. They still own a minivan as a matter of fact, even though now it's just the two of them most of the time. Kate finds this to be part of the magic of Grammy's house. She climbs in the minivan and rides around town on leather seats with her own air conditioning controls, watching Finding Nemo on the in-car entertainment center and loves it. But to Dan, owning a minivan is all tied up with driving that beat up clunker minvan they owned 15 years ago, and he just cannot get over it. As far as he was concerned, it was SUV or 15 passenger van. No in between.

We were at an impasse. Then this summer when all the stuff about the new job in Texas started coming up, the car conversation got moved to the back burner and then rescheduled entirely until after the move. Which brings us up to a few weeks ago, when we arrived in Texas, closed on the sale of our house in Albuquerque and returned to the topic of cars.

In the months we took off from having this argument/thoughtful discussion, Dan had done a lot of consumer research to back up his position that we could buy a non-minivan vehicle that would meet our current needs and leave room for guests or future children. Specifically he was impressed with the GMC Acadia, a crossover-type vehicle that has bucket seats in the middle row, making the third seat more accessible than a bench-style second row. As it turned out, Dan's sister Dinah and her husband Chris recently bought one of these. Even better, Dinah was going on a trip shortly after we got to Texas and said that we could put the kids' car seats in her car and drive it around while she was gone. Meanwhile, Dan's parents were also going to be out of town and offered us the use of their minivan for the same period of time.

This is how we basically embarked on the week long test drive of our two front-runner vehicle styles -- crossover third row SUV and minivan. It was perfect except that ten minutes into driving the Acadia, I found myself waffling on my Minivans are the Best position, because that thing is fun to drive. Having once owned a Chevy Malibu that couldn't get through an entire tank of gas without breaking down, I have not been the biggest fan of domestic-made cars, but that Acadia rocks. And it looks cool too. I could feel Dan's evil plan working. Then we drove the minivan and I swooned every time I opened the door with a clicker. It was not going to be an easy decision.

Two weeks later, we bought a new vehicle and I'll tell you what it is in my next post, in which I will also relate what it was like to shop for a car with Dan. (Preview: At one point I turned to Dan in a car dealership and said "Do we need to leave right now before you do something we're going to regret?" True story.) Feel free to guess whether we bought a minivan or an SUV in the comments section in the meantime and no fair spoiling the surprise if you've already seen us in our new ride. I hope the suspense isn't killing you.