Hello New Truck and...

Warning: this post is long and rather wordy. But keep reading; it's really good at the end.

There are days when God just absolutely blows my mind. Today is one of them, and we are praising Him for His great blessings! TWO of them!

First let me give you more detail on the truck selling/buying. Randy has been looking for pickups off and on for about 6 months on autotrader.com. He started out looking for a 4 wheel drive, 4 door Toyota Tacoma or Nissan Frontier. After looking for several months, we decided that a 4 wheel drive truck just wasn't going to happen in our price range without a ridiculous amount of miles. So he started looking at 2 wheel drive pickups. And then just extended cabs instead of 4 door. Still, everything was really expensive. We finally found several options in Oklahoma City, so when this one guy from Memphis decided to buy our truck (the first guy who was interested....and bought it in a week - praise the Lord), we offered to meet him down there. We've been wanting to get away for a weekend anyhow, so we took the opportunity.

Saturday morning we dropped Wyatt off at Grandma & Grandpa's way too early for their taste (thanks, though!) and headed to OKC with 6 possibilities to look at. We arrived with an hour to look before we needed to meet our potential buyer.

Truck #1 - bald tires, enough front body damage that we questioned if the air conditioning would work, not very clean inside. Later we test drove it and found that in fact the air conditioning did not work (did I mention it was 150 degrees on Saturday?). They still wanted too much money.

Truck #2 - oil everywhere underneath, really bald tires, baling wire holding a hose in place. Still wanted too much money.

Truck #3 - Sold

Truck #4 - Someone was pulling out of the parking lot to test drive it as we were pulling in. We called back later in the day and it was sold.

In an hour the Lord made it extremely clear that these four pickups were not for us.

We met the buyer from Memphis, sold the truck (yay!), and rented a car for the day. Then we went to check out two more pickups at the last dealer. Ever watch the History Channel show "Pawn Stars"? Picture the main bald guy in a ghetto dealership. I laughed the entire time, thankful that my husband has some law enforcement training. The pickups we wanted to look at were literally parked 4 deep. Before he started moving trucks for us to test drive two, we talked money. If he couldn't come down to what we want, there was no point in attempting to move the maze. He couldn't come down and we couldn't go up. Living within our means.

By 2:30 Saturday we were free to start the fun part of our weekend, but that's another post. We left OKC in a rented tin can (one-way rentals are really expensive, by the way), thanking the Lord for making things very clear to us, for leading us, and for the fun, much-needed weekend away. We left OKC ready to buy a car and deal with the pickup issue later. We left OKC ready to seriously compromise on a pickup because what we want is really really hard to find, and we were resigned to settle. We resigned peacefully, knowing God would lead, but we certainly weren't expecting much.

Today Randy came home from work, ready to eat dinner and go look at a pickup. He had seen it downtown today - a 4 wheel drive, extended cab Toyota Tacoma with the right amount of miles AND a price we could possibly pay. Seriously?!?! Is the title clear? Are there major mechanical issues? When the guy told us his bottom dollar, our mouths about dropped open. It was less than what we had discussed at dinner. And actually with sales tax, it was exactly what we had discussed at dinner.

Randy test drove it....and drove it home.

We're both a bit in shock tonight. It's almost exactly what we really wanted but never thought we'd get. It's a truck that he actually really likes (read: we won't be selling this in a year because he just really can't stand it). And it's exactly what we gave up on several weeks ago. Randy thanked the Lord well when we prayed with Wyatt before bed tonight, "Thank you, Lord, for being so faithful to us even when we're not."

AND...on another very exciting note!

That precious little one we were going to learn more about today is a very healthy baby boy! And very clearly one - the sono tech didn't even have to tell us what we were looking at! We're excited for Wyatt to be just 19 months older than his best friend and playmate.