An Updated Experiment

Well, while the enthusiasm is there to have our family live with just the one car, in practice we discovered some "issues".

First, Dave usually leaves his office around 5:30pm. If I'm doing a labor-intensive dinner, such as a stir fry where I'm chopping veggies and standing over the stove for a few minutes, taking the 40 minutes to go out and pick up Dave every day would be a challenge. With the time change, though, we've been having dinner closer to 7pm lately, so we might be able to swing it...at least for our experiment.

If I do simple dinners, such as casseroles and quick homemade pizza, and if I prepare everything ahead of time so I throw it all together as soon as we get home, it can be done. Tonight it was homemade cheesesteaks with raw baby carrots and Ranch dip. 15 minutes.

Also, Thursday is soccer night for Jake, at 5:30pm. So I'd have to pick up Dave at 5pm on the nose to get back to Apex in time for soccer. Dave is willing to work from home on Thursdays, which would be great! I can make a fancy dinner on Thursdays, at that!

So today I drove about 60 miles in just the Prius. That would be ~1 1/2 gallons of gas, compared to 3 gallons it would have been in the van. This morning I dropped off Jake at preschool at 9am and then went straight to campus and was able to drop off Dave around 9:20am. Dave usually is at his office from 9:30am-5:30pm.

I drove Daniel home from the park today, and we had to cram his booster seat into the back of the car along with Jake's booster and Timmy's 5-point convertible seat. The seats all fit, but it was barely so and the seat belting was certainly an effort. But we were legal!

Picking up Dave was an adventure. I can't remember ever being on campus at 5:30pm...what a nightmare, between the auto traffic leaving campus, the students walking everywhere, and the buses stopping every 50 feet. I pulled a "stupid" and tried this roundabout way to get to Dave's building that wasted about 10 minutes. I ended up behind a bus that was stopping at each bus stop. Argh!

Jake, however, enjoyed his views of the young pretty girls. He asked me to put down his window (it was 65 degrees!) while I was crawling through campus traffic and he was hanging out the window yelling "HI!" to the girls. Of course the girls were swooning over cute-little-Jake. What a ham!