[day 29 ... january 29]

This was the LAST day with the tiny 4-door sedan rental car! After the van got hit in late December by falling branches during the Big Snow, I took it to the autobody shop and got a perfectly reasonable but much-too-small Pontiac rental to tide us over. I didn't realize we'd be driving the tiny car for a month!

But today we were finally able to go pick up the van, squeezing it in after a day of meetings, root canal (for me - finally - but that's another story :-) and other appointments, and after school bowling for Niall and Cory. We hurried over to Kenmore in the late afternoon commute and made it before 5:30 p.m. closing. Whew. I did not want even one more day of rental car driving!

On the good side, my insurance covers 30 days of a rental when my own car is out of commission, and the repair took just one day over that. But they don't cover a "comparable vehicle" - just $30 toward whatever car you decide to rent. So although this sedan could *technically* seat five people, there was no way I could have squeezed Kellen or Tynor into the middle in the back seat between Niall and Cory's booster seats. So we had to do some creative juggling with K & T's schedule for spending the night in Seattle (basically they took alternating nights for the school week) or one of them had to walk up the hill. (I know: not exactly a tragedy, but they're used to getting a ride these days and it's dark on those winding, narrow roads that time of night. They do walk down themselves in the morning, so get plenty of exercise that way. :-)

But the hardest part about having the sedan was dealing with the squabbling, wrestling, constantly-hassling-each-other little guys in the back seat all the way to school, all the way home, and then in the evening, all the way down the hill to pick up Kellen or Tynor from the Park and Ride, and all the way back up the hill. The school commute was the worst. Even if I could get Niall reading a book, unless I kept Cory constantly engaged in conversation, he would start poking or kicking or gabbing at Niall, and then it'd be all over. :-( I did finally dig up an old CD player and first Niall, and then Cory, listened to a set of Roald Dahl stories on CD. That helped...a bit...for awhile. Of course, then there were hassles over whose turn it was with the CD player, and who got to decide which story to listen to (you would think that would be the person listening to the story, but Niall had a different idea!). On and on... I'm sure you can imagine.

So thank goodness we are now back in the van with three rows of seats and at least some of the time, the boys can focus on their own activities without being practically on top of each other. Next step is to get inexpensive MP3 players for each of them and get audiobooks from the library. If they are BOTH immersed in a story, that will help a lot. Or so I hope.