You know what would be a lot of fun for you and the wife, and they're unbelievably cheap, and pretty quick, lots of fun to drive, race, and bash, it the traxxas slash. Ultimate Hobbies had them brand new for $179 with free shipping. The dual rate springs are handling jumps remarkably well.
It's great that you and the lady are getting involved together. I was going to build my girlfriend an E-Maxx, but after buying the HV Pro system for my revo and spending $600 just on the motor and batteries, I wasn't in a hurry to get to hers. Last week, I was in the kitchen cooking, and had my new copy of XRC magazine on my nightstand. She had been watching reality shows when I left. Well a lil while later, here she came with XRC in her hand, OPENED to an aritcle. I was shocked, she was actually reading the material and not just looking at the pictures. Anyway, I was so excited that she was showing that much interest in my RC's that I almost burnt the bread. She pointed to the slash and said, "Baby, could you build me one of these?" Man I was super stoked about it, and needless to say I have two slash's on order. I bought a Novak 6.5 brushless system, used, for $125 that's in excellent shpe. You could also buy a brand new sidewinder system for $120 shipped on ebay. The sidewinder is nice because you can hook it up to the USB port and program everything that you can imagine with throttle and brake curves, voltage cutoff, etc...
The slash is really quick on a 7 cell battery and even quicker on an 8 cell. I think she would be happy with it in stock form for a while, and then later if you want more power and speed you could upgrade to brushless.
Just thought I would share the info since my girlfriend really liked the slash, at least it's something to consider.
