If you’re a fan of this site, then you undoubtedly count yourself among one car enthusiast clan or another. So you know as well as we do just how much money and emotion can go into a car, especially one that you’ve owned for a long time and developed a certain attachment to. But at the end of the day, a car is a car, even if that car is a Corvette, and when it comes to providing for family, some people have to make a hard but necessary decision.

Images: Molly Tipton

So it was for Richard Tipton, who found out in 1987 that his wife was pregnant with twins. He had to part with his beloved 1977 Corvette because it wasn’t a proper family car, reports The Detroit Free Press. But Tipton turned out to be a proper family man, because 28 years later his three kids pooled their money together to find and buy his old Corvette, bringing the 69-year old man to tears.

Molly, Andrew, and Abbie Tipton pooled their finances to buy the Corvette, after their father spotted it for sale over a year ago at a used car showroom. “He told my mom, ‘Man, if I ever win the lottery… I’m going to buy my old Corvette back,'” Molly Tipton told the Detroit Free Press. The kids caught the whole thing on camera, with Andrew telling his father “You bought us enough vehicles, dad, time for us to buy you one.”

It’s the same Corvette that Richard and his wife Anne took on their honeymoon after getting married, but it was fatherhood that brought his Corvette back to him nearly three decades later. This is definitely one of those instances where it’s okay for a grown man to cry.