The second “mommy mission” Chevy sent the Mom Squad on involved grocery shopping. They sweetened the deal by giving us each $150 towards the purchase of said groceries. I’m here to tell you: $150 is certainly nice and absolutely appreciated, but if you want to really see what the 2010 Traverse can hold, it takes a whole lot more than $150. It takes a major monthly grocery trip.

There are times I’m much better about meal planning than others. When I know I’m about to enter a really busy season for our family, I take out a three-month subscription to e-Mealz. I’m cheap enough to not subscribe year round; I store the weekly plans on my computer so I can use them again. But sometimes one needs a bit of variety, so I recently did it again for another round of menu planning help.

For my mommy mission, I printed off two weeks’ worth of menus and added all the other things I needed to the back of my list. When I do a MAJOR shop like this, I usually don’t take all four of my kids because…well…because they end up acting like crazy monkeys before the shopping trip is over and one of us ends up causing a scene (I won’t tell you which one of us, but it is rarely me…ahem). Also, my van would never hold all four children AND all the groceries a major monthly trip requires.

So we did the shop. It took three grocery carts. And then we filled up the Traverse. And we filled and we filled and we filled. And you know what? I’m not saying this because I’m trying to be nice to Chevy (take that, St. Louis Post-Dispatch), but I’m really digging the hauling capacity of this car. I love that the third row splits so you can either put the entire row down, or you could just put one seat down, or you could put two seats down, but still keep one up. I think that is pretty brilliant. I could have taken all four daughters today because I totally could have fit them all in this car with all these groceries.

But I’ll tell you: this car isn’t quite perfect. For instance, if the Traverse had gone ahead and unloaded the groceries and put them all away for me, then it would be worthy of the title Perfect Car.

As it is, I have a husband for that.