The Life of a One-Car Family

With the launch of Open Our Eyes: Seeing the Invisible People of Homelessness it’s been a crazy week. That is perhaps the understatement of the year.

If you haven’t bought a copy yet, please do.

Our car has been making funny rattling noises for months and today was finally the time to check it out. Not actually take care of it, just find out what it is. This is the extent of the craziness that is my life. I have to move mountains to schedule an appointment just to find out what’s wrong with my car. Actually fixing it will require moving an entirely separate mountain.

This is what it took today:

Wife leaves for work with the car. Child #1 leaves for school. Me, child #2 and #3 take the bus to go get the car from wife’s work. We drive the car to the mechanic. The mechanic drives us back home. The mechanic drives the car back to the shop. Oil changed, tires rotated, weird noises analyzed, enormous estimate written. Different mechanic comes to pick us up in the shop’s truck because he can’t drive a stick and didn’t realize we needed the carseats. He goes back to the shop and gets the carseats out of our car. Comes back to our house and I install them in the backseat of the truck. Mechanic, me, child #2 and #3 drive back to the shop. I take the carseats out of the truck and put them back in the car. We drive the car to Abby’s work and leave child #2 there. Me and child #3 drive back home. After a nap (not for me) me and child #3 go pick up child #1 from school. Go back home. Me, child #1 and child #3 drive to wife’s work to pick up wife and child #2. The whole family, together for the first time all day, drives home.

Tired yet?

That’s the life of a one-car family. If we could afford it, I’d be tempted to put an end to that and get a second car. But then we’d have twice as many choke-worthy estimates to worry about and suddenly today’s mountain-moving insanity doesn’t seem so bad.

2 thoughts on “The Life of a One-Car Family”

  1. I keep thinking how great it would be to have only one car (or no car) and then I remember we live in the county… 3 miles from the nearest grocery store… 9 miles to any other family… 20 miles from both of our offices and there’s no mass transit in our neck of the woods :-(.

    Maybe some day…

    Until then you might be interested in Tammy Strobel’s book – Simply Car Free (http://ow.ly/38zjC) :-). She was interviewed on The Today Show a couple months back about her story: http://ow.ly/38zpb

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