We are truly blessed.

We are getting ready to go on a family trip to Yellowstone next week. Due to the fact that we had an old van we decided to rent a van to give us AC & to make sure it would get us there. We looked into rental prices a few weeks ago and it didn't seem to be too much. When we went to reserve our rental last week the cost had doubled. We looked into fixing up our van to make the trip. When the mechanic was doing a transmission service he found a disturbing thing. We had parts of our transmission in the pan. He showed me. There was chunks of metal and parts of gasket. The mechanic put it back together and said it would probably lose transmission function very soon. Ken and I drove it straight to the dealership. We were offered $700.00 for the van on trade. We were thrilled about this because we had only paid $900.00 for the van a year ago. We purchased a 2007 Toyota Sienna. Ours is like the one pictured only it is white. We will be making payments on it for some time :) We love it though and we hope to drive it into the ground 20 years from now.

The monthly payment made me think a bit and I was mental inserting it into our budget. As soon as we got home I received a message from a lady in our ward that is going to do preschool next year. I called her back and it looks like it would be free for Brady to go in exchange for me watching her 2 littlest children. That puts $75.00 a month back into our budget that I would have paid for Brady to attend the same preschool he went to last year. I also worked a deal with the kids mom to let me watch them on her weeks instead of having them go to daycare. That should give me another 120.00 per month. These two differences and some of our other money should cover the new payment. We are so blessed. The Lord truly knows our needs and watches out for our family. We felt guided in our decisions. We are so grateful that this problem was discovered before the van stopped functioning. We were able to get very good money out of it and get a great van that will last a long time and we should be able to go on this vacation and many others in it.