So this past Sunday night / Monday morning (a week or so), I’m laying in bed when I hear one of the kids screaming / crying. I’m kind of half asleep, and it wakes me up. In my half-asleep stupor I wonder where Carolyn is. Not that it’s her job to get the kids when they wake up in the middle of night, but typically she does that. So I roll over and I notice that a) it’s like 4 a.m. and b) Carolyn is not bed. Again, remember I am half asleep so I think “hmm well that’s weird”

The 2 possibilities I entertain are that perhaps she is in the bathroom, or maybe she is tending to one kid and a different kid is crying. So I think okay I will go investigate. So I start to make my way out of our bedroom and into the main living area. As I do this I start waking up and I realize that it’s not one of the kids – It’s CAROLYN who is crying / screaming. I hustle to the sound and she is laying down at the foot of the stairs in obvious pain.

The combination of dark, tired, pregnant (so not as agile as she once was) and a new house (so not as familiar with number of steps and such) caused her to miss the last step or two. I guess she thought she was on the last step and so took a normal sized step so she fell down the last step or two. Ended up breaking her foot and spraining her ankle. You can read her take here.

I was joking around and told her the other day that this was not a very convenient time for her to decide to break her foot! But then she told me that it would have been way worse say 6 months from now. Touche, touche!! My mom has come down from Cleveland to stay with us for awhile and we’ve had lots of friends come over to help unpack some and bring us over some meals and such. We are very grateful to all our helpers.

In further annoying news, everyone else besides me was driving home from the library on Saturday during a crazy thunderstorm when all of a sudden the van stopped really working. Power steering went out, the engine started overheating and in general craziness ensued. They managed to limp home but it turns out that the van’s drive belt slipped off its track. It looks like the belt itself is still in good condition but we were not able to get it back into place. And of course when I say we I mean I stood around and watched while one of my more car-savvy friends tried to do it. In an interesting coincidence, I had just called Midas the day before to bring in the van to have them put on our new tires that I bought off the Internet. I had already been planning to take the van there so this just made it that much more fun!!

Complicating the matter was the fact that the side door had accidentally been left open all night, meaning that the battery was dead when we went to try and start it on Sunday morning. We managed to push the van out of the driveway with my mom’s car, and then I pushed it over to the side of the street. And of course by “I”, I mean I flailed around barely moving it until thankfully some random guy came by out for a walk and he helped me. It was much easier with 2 people, surprisingly enough :-). One funny thing was that we kept trying to push it over to where I had parked the little car (preparing for a jumpstart), and it was getting harder as the road was starting to go uphill, till I realized that maybe it might be easier to put the van in park and actually move the car that could actually work!?!?!? :-).

We jumped it and the van started up. I let it rev for awhile and put the window down so I could hear things. But as soon as I removed the jumper cables, the van died. I tried that twice with the same result and then decided to give up for awhile. I got ready for church and went there, and in the meantime, eagle-eye Carolyn noticed that there was something hanging below the van. That turned out to be the aforementioned belt. Perhaps by losing the ability to walk her other senses have been honed? I charged the battery and in the evening, our friend came over and we tried for awhile to get the belt back on. In the end, we just took it up to Midas. I guess you can drive without a belt but you don’t have power steering and you only have a limited amount of juice before the battery dies. So my friend offered to drive and I tried to follow him. But he was driving like a maniac because he wasn’t sure how much time he’d have. He passed a few cars on the double yellow and he told me he ran every red light :-). Good times….

We’ll see how much the damage is….