"Are they twins?"

One of my favorite questions to be asked when I'm out with the kids is, "Are they twins?" (in reference to Reuben and Krassimir, who are still essentially the same size.) I love this question because it opens up so many opportunities for interesting conversations with strangers about real topics that matter to me. There's the obvious topic of adoption - it's so neat to be able to introduce them as brothers, yes, but far from being twins, one of them is half the age of the other, and they're not even genetically related. But there are other topics, too. Although Krassimir's handicap is pretty obvious visually, Reuben's differences are usually pretty apparent as well by the time we've gotten this far into a conversation. ;) Sometimes I wonder if it's because the boys are both "different" that people assume they're twins, and less that they look particularly alike.  But to be able to speak in a positive light about the challenges of raising these boys - after all, one of them we didn't get a choice on, but the other we did! - opens the opportunity to talk about the value of all human life, and the richness that these two boys - and not just these, too, but all of our children, because I usually have at least some of the others with me - add to the world around them. The obvious small stature of Krassimir in comparison to his half-his-age brother provides the chance to talk about the injustices that exist in the world today - this isn't just happening "somewhere" to "someone" but it happened to real live person sitting with us at this very moment. And it's not okay.

No, they're not twins, but I'm so glad you asked.

Offer...accepted!!!

Woo hoo!!

Matt just called me on his way home saying they accepted our offer! This just blows me away, though it really shouldn't. Once again, God has made it possible for us to conduct our financial affairs in the way He's directing us to. Matt said he just told the seller how much money we had saved up (to the exact cent!) and asked if that was okay, and the seller's response was that the number we were offering was $500 less than what he'd had in his head for where he wanted to end up, and he was okay with that!

Done!!

We'll go pick it up next weekend.

Making an offer

Matt's on his way to return Big Blue and make an offer!

Test run

I'll have to get a photo tomorrow, but the most current update on the status of Big Blue is that we've done a 24 hour swap with our "Little Blue" (the Jetta my parents gave us last year) so Matt can run Big Blue in person to our mechanic and body shop tomorrow to check things over before we make an offer. That means right now, Big Blue is sitting out in our very own driveway. Pretty crazy. ;)

"Big Blue"

Because I'm slow sometimes, this post was started nine days ago, and is just now going to try to get out where the rest of you can see it. "This morning" (and by that I mean the morning of May 2, the day I started this post), we test drove a vehicle a friend found for us on craigslist. Its name is "Big Blue" and it's owned by a family with seven children and two big dogs who doesn't need it anymore as enough of their seven are getting old enough that they don't all need to regularly go places together in the same vehicle.

What we love about Big Blue is that it's BLUE and not white (I told Matt that if/when we needed to get an industrial size vehicle, I at least didn't want an industrial color). It *only* has 89,000 miles on it, which, for a diesel engine, is not that much, really, and, as a final touch, it's got the Mercedes logo on it that we think is so fitting for Matt, the Man-who-used-to-be-really-into-fancy-cars. (Frieghtliner and Dodge both also make the Sprinter, so those are other potential options, but not really as fitting as the Mercedes.)

 

We love that the current seats are slightly more generously sized than the "pack it all in" option, so even though we can't get full 11 or 12 capacity, we'd be able to still fit our whole family, even with losing some seating to a wheelchair lift and lock down, and do so in a VERY comfortable way even with many still in car seats or boosters. We'd always have the option down the road to swap out a 3-row for a 4-seater, for example, if it was ever useful. I love that it doesn't have the extra heat/AC package mounted on the top of the vehicle - even though that would make for increased comfort for the passengers in the back, it also increases the visual size of the beast, and knowing that a family with seven children has successfully used the vehicle in MN winters trekking back and forth to school, and for cross-country family vacations in the summer and they all survived gives me confidence that we could, too.

What we don't like so much is the rust, and really, that's what's putting us on pause for the moment. Matt's been talking to a body shop, and is hoping to get the vehicle over there sometime next week so the man he's working with can see it in person. I'm okay with rust visually, but even used, this is still a big investment, and once we put a lift into it, we will want it to last for a very long time - long enough that we'll be ready to downsize...to a mini-van. ;) So we don't want to purchase something so rusty that it will be incredibly expensive to fix, or is so far gone that we'll be dealing with gaping holes after a  year or two.

Ever since last fall when we test-drove the new one and got it priced out (at $50K! Yikes!!) we've been pushing as much money into our savings as we can, and mulling over our options. The dealership was willing to offer us decent financing rates, but after everything we've heard God directing us toward in not living with debt, and seeing the amazing ways he provided what we needed when we needed it to build the house and pay for all of Krassi's adoption expenses without needing to incur any debt, neither one of us was comfortable taking a loan for a vehicle. I don't know what we were expecting would happen, but we were both just...waiting.

So, to have our friend mention Big Blue on the same day that this happened, did not in any way seem accidental to us. Nor did the fact that after we emailed our inquiry through craigslist that weekend, and didn't hear anything for a few days, that on the day we finally DID hear back from the seller, it just "happened" to be the same day that Matt got a phone call from a past client whose invoice was months past due saying that he had just cleaned out his truck and found the envelope with our check in it stashed under the seat and he would be dropping it off in twenty minutes. And he did.

Sometimes I feel like such a child - that as I walk patiently, sometimes seemingly aimlessly, God is right there holding my hand. I just tonight finished reading a biography of a Christian woman growing up and living in Communist Romania, and am humbled by the surficial nature of the challenges of my life. While I am grateful for the sometimes painfully obvious ways He shows himself to us, it is also a reminder to me of how very undeserving I am of that care! And I pray that He will sustain my faithfulness even when it isn't so easy to see that He's working.

So that's where we're at - we have friends who are willing and ready (money and all) to buy our van from us. Even with that we still don't have the asking price for Big Blue, much less that plus whatever we would need for body work (we'd probably wait until the fall to save up a bit more), but the seller has said a number of times that he would like to sell it to us, and that he's got some flexibility with the price, so I guess we'll see what happens. If it's our van, we'll have enough for it!