This is going to be super long and convoluted so I will probably break it up into at least 2 posts, but we'll see where my rambling takes me.

We are currently in the "when it rains it pours" stage of life; and I can't say I'm happy about it.

In December, driving home from a family day, about 1.5 away from home, our check engine light came on, the car started dinging at us and the dash said "loss of engine power". At the time, we were 2 miles away from where we were going to dinner, so we were able to get there and have dinner.  The Husband keeps an error code reader thingy (that's the technical term, LOL) in the car so he was able to figure out what the error was. It wasn't good! It had something to do with the pistons. (Again, I don't know much about cars!)

We have a very good friend who is a mechanic and The Husband called him and asked him what we should do. He said at this point, we were in survival mode so just try to limp the car home. (He also told us to call him at any point and he would come get us if we couldn't get home! He is a very good friend!) After an arduous trek home at about 40 miles an hour, we made it. (It's a very long story and quite honestly a blog post can't do it justice, but in reality, we felt like God was looking out for us and it happened in the best way it could have!)

Because of the holiday season, we were unable to get the car looked at until the first week in January.  My car is old but has been reliable and a great vehicle and we didn't want a new car payment, so we were hoping to have it repaired. The estimate was $1600. We debated and decided to go with it. We figured if we got only 4 more months out of the car, it would be the same as if we had a $400 per month car payment. 

We got the car back and everything was fine for about 10 days. Then, the check engine light came on again. I cried, The Husband swore, and we were both stressed! This time, the reader said it was emissions problem. For $100, The Husband replaced the O2 sensor. And the car was good for about 5 days. The check engine light came on AGAIN! Out mechanic friend old us if it wasn't the O2 sensor, it was probably the catalytic converter. 

Of course, the catalytic converter is a super expensive fix and our registration was due in March and it was a SMOG year. (In California, you only have to SMOG your car every other year.)

We were both super bummed, mostly because we had chosen to fix the car and it didn't even look like we were going to get the 4 more months out of it that we were hoping to get.

For the next several weeks, the car mostly sat in the driveway. (We are very fortunate that my mom lives with us and we were able to use her car!) However, last week The Husband took my car to his Daddy and Me dance class and when he got home, he told me that while he was driving, the check engine light turned off! (I understand this does not mean my car is fixed.) So this past weekend we decided to see if it would pass SMOG... and IT DID! We actually took it to an "official testing site" and it passed just fine.

We know something is still going on with my car, but its passing SMOG gives us a little more time to figure things out, pay off some more debt, and save up some more for a down payment of a new (or new to us) car.

Unfortunately, even after this whole car saga, it's still "raining" on us. But, as expected, because this turned into a super long post, I'll write about our other storms sometime this week. But not to totally sound like a whiner, I want to add that we are so lucky in so many ways! We had my mom's car to use, we paid cash to fix the car, we still have money in emergency savings, and we were offered cars to use (temporarily) by multiple family members. We are blessed beyond measure and even when we feel like things aren't going our way, we really are very fortunate!