Speedbumps

I'm not exactly sure what we did to deserve this.....

I blew out the head gasket in my van.
Then the water pump went out in The Dude's truck (while I was driving it).
My dishwasher crapped out on Mother's Day.
My lawnmower died the other day.

Then this evening, The Dude was out running a couple of errands, including picking up supper for us, and he called me to say that the truck had broken down. Again.

Anyway, it ended up being really minor. I took the boys, went and got him, we ran to the auto parts store and back to his house to get his tools, replaced the solenoid in the parking lot of the pizza place, and boom - back on our way again, all in less than an hour.

Still.... it's frustrating. It seems like just when we fix something - another thing breaks. Luckily this time, it was cheap and easy to fix. But I'm getting tired of fixing stuff. Besides the fact that it's generally really inconvenient, it's also getting really expensive.

We keep spending money on fixing stuff - and it's money that we're trying to put towards other stuff.

We're trying to figure out a way to make TMOART:13 happen (if you're new around here, that stands for The Mother Of All Road Trips: 2013 Edition) but at this rate - it looks like it might not. We want to rent a bigger van to do it so that the kids are more comfortable (and let's face it - if it's a rental and it breaks down, someone else has to pay to fix it) but from looking into that, a rental will easily tack another $1000-1500 to the total cost of the trip. We just might not be about to do it this year.

Even though we keep breaking stuff, we
have fun fixing it.

We're still trying to get moved so that we can have all of the kids in the same school district, and moving takes money too. Funny how that works.

But still, even though this is all so incredibly frustrating, we're still plugging along. We're still making plans (and adjusting them) and we're moving forward and we're looking into doing some other things that involve some really big steps (no, not THAT kind of a step) and all in all, no matter what, life is good. We might keep hitting speedbumps, but that's all they are - they might temporarily slow us down a bit, but they're not sending us off into some other direction.

I figure at this point that if we can deal with this much broken crap, we should be able to handle just about anything. We'll just keep going over the speedbumps, one by one.

We might lose what little bit of our minds that we have left.....but it'll just make the ride more interesting.