Recently my husband and I have been discussing selling his truck and getting something a little better on gas.  He drives almost 60 miles roundtrip to work each day–sometimes twice a day–and the beautiful Titan Quad cab he has is lovely, but it’s a gas-sucker of the first order.  In short, while he-man wonderful, it isn’t practical.   With my son just a couple of short years away from driving, we’ve been talking about cars a lot lately and my daughter, who loves the truck, was worried about what we would buy to replace it.

“So we might sell Daddy’s truck?” she asks.

“We’re thinking about it.  We need something that gets better gas mileage.”

She frowned sort of fearfully.  “We aren’t getting a Mento are we?”

“A Mento?”  I am completely baffled.  We’ve talked about several different options, but a breath mint hasn’t been one of them.

“You know,” she prodded.  “A Mento.  Like your first car.”

At this point I absolutely dissolved into a fit of laughter.  My first car was a bright green 1978 Ford Pinto–which had been hit by a deer–and it was far from lovely.  But *I* loved it because it was my first car, my first key to freedom, and what it lacked in style, it made up for in reliability.  I recently googled the Pinto so my kids could see what it looked like.

Needless to say, they weren’t impressed.

“No, daughter,” I tell her, still snickering.  “We won’t be getting a Mento.”