Limping to the Finish

It's almost May.  Things are winding down, but they're not done yet.  But somehow everything in our house is done.

Our poor Sienna quit on me a week ago Thursday.  I had just picked up Joel Mc on our way to German class.  They live about 2 1/2 miles away from us, so not far at all.  The Lord or something made me notice my temperature gauge--wow, I didn't think it ever went over halfway!  And actually--whoa!  It's really rising!  quickly!  Even though the German teacher only lives another 3-4 miles away, it became obvious we were not going to get there, and I did not want to make the left turn onto the big main street, and then have the car completely overheat into the red zone (which it was *quite* close to doing.  So we pulled into the community college parking lot.  When I opened the hood, steam poured out.  It was pretty hot!  Christine was able to come rescue Anna and Joel and take them on to German, and another girl in Jonathan's math class lives right by the community college.  Her mom was able to swing by and pick up Jonathan to take him to his math carpool (where praise the Lord, I was NOT driving that day!).  And also fortunately, this is the car Luke drives to his classes, so it already had the parking pass in there.  Eventually I got tired of waiting for it to cool down, and I abandoned it there to walk home--except Christine saw me, turned around, and gave me a lift the rest of the way home!  Now the Sienna is the proud possessor of a new water pump, thermostat, and serpentine belt.  Quite a day!

Another thing that has given out is our ice maker.  Since I LOVE ice water, this is particularly grating.  I think it's given us warning--this whole winter it could never really keep up, but I kept blaming it on the kids filling up their water bottles before basketball practices.  But when basketball stopped, things never got better.  It made less and less and less ice . . . and now it's just not making any.  The freezer isn't really all that cold either.  Ice cream never stays frozen.  We are seeing the writing on the wall, and so we're starting to research new fridges.  In the meantime, I'm buying a 20 pound bag of ice a week, and we're going right through it, lol.

The most devastating thing is our poor bunny Pikachu.  He really hurt himself last night, and honestly, we're not sure if he will recover.  Bob heard something around 5:15 AM last night, so he got up to investigate.  Him coming downstairs sent Pikachu into tizzy, and when Bob turned on the light in his room, he freaked out, running around and getting his leg and head stuck in between the bars of the outer pen (not the little cage).  Bob couldn't get him out, so he woke me up to help.  We were able to get him out by Bob bending the bars a la Samson (how on earth did he get his head through there in the first place?!), but now Pikachu can't move his hind legs.  I know bunnies are so fragile, especially their backs.  We are hoping he didn't break it.

There were many tears this morning when the kids got up.  If he did break his back, he will have to be put down.  Best case scenario is he sprained it, which he could heal from, although it would take a long time.  I told the girls that if we had to put him down, our next pet would probably be a dog, because I didn't think we could emotionally handle another fragile creature.  This caused fresh paroxysms of grief from Grace, in particular:  "I didn't want to TRADE Pikachu for a dog!"  Well, no, none of us do, and this is not a scenario we never even imagined.  

We didn't take him to the vet today, and I'm not going to take him tomorrow either.  The only real thing a vet could do is x-ray the back and tell us definitely if something is broken (for several hundred dollars).  The internet pretty much said he'll either start showing improvement after 3 days or so, or he won't, in which case it probably is broken.  If it is broken, we'll have to put him down--and Grace really doesn't want him to die on her birthday, which is tomorrow.  So we are putting off potential bad news, and praying the Lord will allow him to heal.  

In the meantime, we are limping along, trying to finish the year out, as finals and APs start next week.  I wish I could say we will all be done with school in 2 weeks, but alas, Micah has really ramped up the tantrums this month, so he's still not off on his way with reading.  And the girls still have a fair amount left in math and grammar to finish that they will have to do over the summer.  Ah, the elusive summer break.  Not this year!  But I'll be happy if things will just stop breaking around here.