This weekend we went shopping for 2 of the 3 major purchases we intend to make this summer: a sectional with a hide-a-bed for the family room and a new minivan. I think we found the sectional and minivan we want, but it’s still going to take a while to finalize everything. We’re going to get the Aaron line La-Z-Boy sectional, and I think we liked the Dodge Grand Caravan SXT that we test drove.
It will take about 8 weeks to get the sectional we need (nobody stocks sectionals with sofa beds), so we won’t have it before Grandma Lehrian comes to visit in 2 weeks, but we are going to get it on order anyway. Renee has to go back up to Wabash to choose a fabric (the hardest part of buying any furniture) and then we’ll just be waiting for it to get here.
We are going to trade in the Jeep Liberty for the minivan. I love driving the Jeep, but with 2 kids now, and times when Collin wants to take his friends somewhere, we need the extra room that the Liberty just doesn’t have. Plus it will make it easier to haul family around when we all get together to visit. We’re looking at a new one, because I love the Stow-N-Go seating feature that they have on them. I hated having to take the seats out of our old minivan when I needed room for cargo. These seats just fold down into the floor and you have a flat floor for you to haul whatever it is you need to haul. We might make a deal on one of these this week, depending on what they can give us for trade-in on the Jeep, and if we don’t find a van we like better somewhere else. We’ll see…
Our third big purchase will be a new front door for the house, but we’re not in a big hurry to buy that, either.
We also went to the 90th birthday party for Harold Burke, who is Renee’s great uncle (thanks to Renee’s mom for clarifying this for me). So I guess that makes him Collin’s great-great uncle. We kept telling Collin that many of the people there were related to him somehow, but we didn’t really know how (I never did figure out how the whole ‘cousin’ thing works). Anyway, Renee went to buy a happy 90th birthday card for him at Walgreen’s and the cashier said, “I bet we don’t sell too many of these.” She’s never met Renee’s family – they all live to be quite old. Renee will most likely outlive me, if you only take family history into consideration.
The party was in Leipsic, OH (pronounced “lip-sick”), except Collin kept calling it “lipstick.” It took us about 2 hours to get there. On the way back (in Van Wert, OH) we ate at probably the fanciest McDonald’s I’ve ever set foot in. It was brand new with nice tile and marble everywhere, contemporary fashionable light fixtures, a computer play area for the kids, a flat-panel HDTV hanging on the wall with CNN on, and wireless Internet access to boot! The prices were a bit higher than our neighborhood McDonald’s, but not too much. It was very nice. Sorta like a Starbucks, but it was a McDonald’s… On the wall it said welcome to Jerry Lewis’ McDonald’s. I have no idea if that’s a reference to THE Jerry Lewis (with a “Lee” in the middle) or not. Anyway, it was the nicest McDonald’s I’ve ever seen.
Filed under: Family, General Musings
Ethyl is Renee’s great aunt.