Our new addition!

The time has come for us to have a new addition to our family.  We broke down and bought a New (to us) Toyota Sienna (2006, if anyone wants to know)! It was definitely time!  We loved having our old van, but it was time to move on.  That van came at a time we really needed it and couldn't afford any more than that.  Lately it's been falling apart though.  The driver side window wouldn't roll down, the speedometer was hit and miss if it would actually work, it was super noisy and whenever you would accelerate (so, not that often...) it would sound like it was about to die, the engine leaks A LOT (we have the stains on our driveway to prove it), and every time you start it up a large stinky cloud would penetrate the air.  Anyways, like I said, it was time for something new.

We looked around for a couple weeks and knew what we were looking for.  We decided that we needed to go up to Salt Lake and look around because the type of Sienna we wanted was not found (or just didn't stay long) in Utah County.  We went up to a dealership first thing in the morning and they had 2 really nice Sienna's available.  It was a small dealership and they were trying to get rid of all their inventory before the end of the year (I guess so they could start over fresh in January and didn't have to carry anything over to the next year).  We test drove both and fell in love with ours.  It was way more than we wanted, it's basically fully loaded, but it was such a good deal that we felt we couldn't pass it up!  I am such a sucker for a great deal...  So, here's our new van!

 It has a built in DVD player (even with wireless headsets) which the kids are excited about.  John is excited about the sunroof.  I'm excited about the button that unlocks all the doors!  No more fiddling around with the key in the cold!

 I am so excited about the Captain's chairs!  I never thought I would like them, but our kids don't do well close to each other ("Mom, he's breathing my air!"... That sort of thing...) so it will be nice to have a little space between them.  :)

 This little gadget tells you the temperature, miles per gallon, how many more miles you can drive before you need to fill up & what direction you are driving.  There's also sliding door buttons & a trunk button :)

 It took us a while to figure out the heater.  It's pretty high tech.  There's a button for the drivers temp, the passengers temp, & the rear temp.  One cool thing we figured out last night was you can have the heater on, and it wont blow out the air till it's warmed up.  Then it just automatically turns on & blows when the air is hot!  We also love the seat heaters since it has leather seats.  We didn't want leather, but that's what the van has, so oh well.

When we bought this new van, we knew it was bigger than our other one.  I had my doubts if it would even fit in our garage.  Well, it does.  Barely.  I am sort of a nerd so I measured how much "extra" room have around the van.  We basically have 6" total space between the front and back of the van and when you pull in we have about 2 1/2" on either side of the mirrors.  But, at least it fits!

 So, what kind of deal did we get?  $3,000 below NADA pricing, $4,000ish below KBB, & $2,000 below Edmunds (which is normally on the low end).  This really helps me to LOVE it even more!  I don't like having to spend so much money, and we really don't need all the cool gadgets, but we really needed a new van.  I'm glad that Johnathan will have a break from fixing the van for a while, hopefully a LONG while.