Choose your carpool wisely. . .

At the beginning of this school year, I was 6 months pregnant. With one vehicle for our family, I was responsible for getting Brett to his part time externship three days a week at a local law firm about 7 minutes away, driving him to school (depending on the weather), getting Katie to and from a three hour preschool about 15 minutes away four days a week, and all the while, dragging around in the car with me a two year old who was tired of spending an hour + strapped in a car seat. Katie has afternoon preschool too, so after dropping her off at school and prying away the two year old (who was dying to stay at school too) I raced home, fed Amanda as fast as she would eat (which still took about an hour), put Amanda down for a nap right after eating (poor girl must've had a tummy ache every day!) and if I'm lucky, she would go to sleep within 15 minutes, so I could wake her up an hour later to race back to get Katie from school. We'd get home and have about half an hour to almost get interested in playing something before it was back to the car to go pickup Brett. (and I was supposed to be preparing dinner while driving around too so we could eat when Brett got home). That's only the afternoon!
Needless to say, I hated spending so much time in the car. I had so much else I needed/wanted to do and I felt awful about taking away so much time from Amanda that she couldn't play either. That doesn't even touch on the topic of traffic flow in Utah County. (In a recent Provo City Council meeting, they actually addressed the citizen complaints that the traffic lights are so poorly timed that it GREATLY inhibits traffic flow in almost every part of town--their response: "we assure you that the lights are timed to allow the greatest traffic flow"--another post, I assure you).
Anyway. . . .long story short, I was greatly motivated to look for a carpool option for Katie to get to preschool. A family in our ward had applied for the same preschool but was only on the wait list. Most students lived closer to the preschool than we do (southwest of our home) and so they didn't want to carpool with us. I called at least half a dozen families about carpooling before I finally got a family that was interested. They live in BYU student housing (north of us). I was a bit hesistant about sending Katie with someone we didn't know well, and the schedules didn't quite match up, but it ended up saving me two trips a week to preschool. Beggars can't be choosers, I'll take it! Thus, Katie became friends with Luka in the back seat of a car on the way home from preschool every day. Katie has been asking me for probably five months when she can have a playdate with Luka (spending 20 minutes in the car with him and 15 minutes in the front yard at dropoff just wasn't enough fun for them). Now that winter is mostly over and Ellie is a little older, I finally relented this week and Luka played at our house after school yesterday. After dropping off Luka to his home at dinner time, Katie asks me, "Mom, when can I marry Luka?" You never know the repercussions of choosing a carpool. He may become your future son-in-law! (By the way, I told her that maybe in 20 years if he's still a good boy and will take her to the temple, she can marry him then).