Catch-up post: replacement car

We knew April would be extremely busy before the car accident and with this new wrench thrown in our plans there were days that were downright frantic. After a week without a car (the police officer recorded the name of the street wrong so it took awhile to get the report and work with the insurance...) we got a rental, which we fell in love with. It was a 2008 Nissan Xterra. After a lot of research on things like "the car you are least likely to die in in an accident" and other fun topics we decided on getting an Xterra. The gas mileage isn't great, but it sure is a sturdy car! There are a couple cars that are better (newer 4Runners and Odyssey minivans - which will probably be our next purchase - but because we are in the process of buying a house we couldn't buy a car in a higher price range than what we got from the insurance company for the CR-V so we ended up with a 2002 Black Nissan Xterra.

Buying the car was complete craziness as I was going out of town to find us a house to buy and Ryan was working a lot (he always works 8-5, but he also has quite a few 24 hour shifts of on-call where he has to stay at the hospital - not conducive to car shopping). One night we drove 2 1/2 hours to Sanford, NC to look at a car we ended up not buying. It took the boys days to recover from being up until midnight. Then the clutch in Ryan's civic went out and we had to turn the rental car back in and we literally came within 24 hours of not having even one car!