Changes

Well, we have some changes coming around here! The first is a little bit old news, we traded in my car and got a minivan!! I think I'm the first of my mom friends to do so...I was not thrilled about it at first. We'd talked for a long time about what we'd need in a bigger car and I wanted to hold off for a while. I wanted an SUV like a Traverse or something. Alex wanted a third row (in case we had more kids or in case our kids actually wanted to bring a friend somewhere!) and he just wasn't impressed with any of the third rows in any SUVs. He eventually wore me down, since he was right about the third rows being really small. And we have several family members with minivans that highly recommended them. We were still making payments on my Kia, so it made sense to go look at the Kia dealer first! We pretty much saw this one on the lot (2012 Sedona, slightly used, Alex thought for a good price), drove it, and brought it home that day. Our payment worked out to be pretty much the same, so it really did make sense to trade for a better family car. It makes it really nice to be able to keep both strollers (our City Mini and the double snap and go) in the back. And Alex loves to play with the configurations of seats and fold them down, stow them, etc. It's working great for us so far! The gas mileage isn't great, but we don't drive this one as much, since I just take the boys on errands and to playdates. :)

The second piece of news is that I'm starting to teach again. I'm going to be teaching private violin and viola lessons at a music store in town, starting today. I was really hoping to have more students at my house, since that offers the best flexibility, but this seems like a good place to teach. I'm a little nervous, but hopefully it'll be great. My hours will be 3-8 in the evenings on Mon/Tues/Wed, so that'll be a big change. My mom will cover Mon/Tues till Alex gets home, and we'll eventually need a sitter on Wed. For the summer I don't have students on Wed. yet and if I get some, my friends who are teachers can babysit. I was hoping to have a pretty full schedule, but right now it doesn't seem like I have a lot. I guess a lot of people drop lessons over the summer, so we'll see how it picks up. I guess it's a good thing to start slow and build up. I'm nervous about being away from them all evenings and Alex having to do everything himself all evening, including dinner and bottles and bed. But it means that we don't have to use much daycare or babysitters, so we'll give it a try! So wish me luck...hopefully it'll be a great fit. Right now I'm just nervous until I've met all my students and until we get our new routine down. It's depressing to think all of my evenings are busy when most of my friends are free in the evenings, but that's the gig, I guess! :)