My poor car, part 2?

Seriously, I have always considered myself to be a decent driver.  Not fast, not flashy, but very safe and reliable.  Of course, 30 days after we purchased our car, I had that little accident in the driveway.  A claim was filed with our insurance and we paid the excess (deductible for us Americans) and all was fixed and good. 
Remember our driveway from this post.
Well, I seem to have had some trouble with it again.  I backed down this morning and got too close to the last retaining wall on the left side.  By too close, I mean that I felt my wheels hit the top part of it.  So, I knew what had happened last time I tried to drive off of the stones.  I decided that this time, we'd just park, get out and call for help.  I put the handbrake on, but it didn't hold the car on the steep hill and down we went.  Thankfully, we were all buckled up and Joe, Tom and I are just fine.  My car...well, again...it's not so nice.  I don't think that it is as bad as last time, but it will need to be fixed in order to sell the car when we move back to the States. 
I think that we won't turn it into the insurance this time.  2 claims in less than 60 days of each other will cause them to drop me.  I really don't want to be dropped as it will be hard to get insurance somewhere else, once you've been dropped.  I have been asking for years to some diamond earrings to replace the one I'd lost.  We now have the money for it, but I will just have to wait some more.  I think I will use that money to repair the two doors that I damaged and I won't worry about the hubcap or the bottom of the back bumper.
Not the way I really wanted to start my day.

Some catching up

So, I need to do some catching up.  Here we go!
Tom's birthday was a fun little time with the fam.  Tom requested that his cake be pink inside and that he have toys on top of it.  When asked about what toys, he replied "surprise me."  Okay, so I made my very first ever red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting and put some LEGO cars on top of it.  It was incredibly good and (once the toys were off) looked great. 

I somehow managed to never get an picture showing the inside, but it was quite reddish pink.  The recipe for the cake called for 1.5-4.5 tablespoons of red food coloring.  Since we were going for more of a pink than a red, I did 2 tablespoons.  It was plenty red.  I couldn't even imagine 4.5 tablespoons going into a cake.  That's a lot of color! 
The tilers showed up on Wednesday and did some work on the house and another guy showed up on Friday to put some more waterproofing on.  We are expecting rain on Tuesday so I don't know when the tilers will show up to actually put the tile on.  I can't wait until it's done!
My car is finally getting fixed!  It's been just about a month from my little mishap and we finally dropped it off this morning to be repaired.  It is in the shop for the next few days.  My insurance policy has rental car coverage so I have a free car during this repair.  And I must say, we get what we pay for.  I am driving a tiny little 4 door hatch back car.  It has power windows in the front, but crank windows in the back.  It also has ZERO cupholders.  Imagine my surprise when I sat down in the car with my cup of coffee and found no place to put it.  Oh, did I mention that it too is a manual.  There was no way to drive and drink my coffee since I had no cup holder.  I had to sit in the parking lot and people watch while drinking my cuppa.  I didn't even have anything to read. (Okay, so I mentioned to Jay that they was no cupholders and he went in search of them.  He couldn't find them, until he looked in the manual and there are two cupholders in the front.  Little hidden ones that you have to press to pop out.  I looked in the center consol for them, but they weren't there.  There is one, under the heat vent, on each side of the car. Tricky little devils.) We did okay getting the boys home from school today since Sam wasn't there, but I have no idea how we are going to fit all those kids in the car.  There's an airbag up front so we aren't supposed to put Joe up there.  I don't think they will fit three across in the back.  It just means we won't be going any where extra and we'll be walking to school as much as we can.  Though with rain tomorrow, we'll have to drive a bit.
I am really really bad about putting clothes in the washer and not checking pockets, etc.  I just tend to dump the whole basket in.  Well, that went a little wrong twice this weekend for me.  I found a huge bug that had been through the washer and died when I was hanging clothes on the line.  I posted a picture on Facebook of that if you want to see it.  And, I put a pull-up through the wash.  Diapers don't do well being that wet so it exploded and was a horrible mess.  Sam typically gets dressed on his own in the morning and puts his pull-up in the trash, but I guess he forgot this one.  I had to clean out the inside of the machine and then rewash the clothes.  All this comes about a week after I washed some toy of the boys and it got stuck on the inside of the dryer and caused a problem.  I really just need to check pockets. 
We had a couple of trips to the doctor's last week and spent a total of $370 between two kids and two days.  Each visit is $70 (3 visits), plus x-rays at $130 and medicine at $30.  We'll get some of it back from insurance, but not all of it.  We went because Joe had a hurt ankle and Tom had pink eye.  I had decided to do a little shopping in Newcastle on last Thursday.  It takes an hour to get down there and I was only there about 5 minutes when the school called.  I then had to drive all the way back to get Tom. Tom's eye was all red and he didn't want to leave school.  I walked in the office door and he asked if he could go back to class.  When I said no, he started to cry.  Poor kid. 
Sam has been doing pretty well at his school, though he has been bitten twice, each time by a different kid.  Both times have been because Sam is not sharing toys well.  Sam was a bitter himself when he was younger, but he only bit Tom and me, never anyone else.  We are going to visit a different sort of pre-school this week.  It didn't have any openings for this year, but loads of openings for next year.  The school is only open during school hours and is loads cheaper.  It is only $25 a day versus the $68 that we pay now.  We do have to supply their food, but I don't mind that.  One of my new friends here has her daughter in it right now and another friend had her daughter in it last year.  Both highly recommend it. It's about 10 minutes away from the big kids school so not too bad.  Hopefully, we will like it and we'll get a spot. 
Okay, that's all for now.

My poor car

Okay, so my poor new car has had a rough couple of days.  On Saturday at the Kuring-gai Chase National Park, Jay backed into a small landscaping pole.  This caused a small dent and a scrape on the bumper.  I teased him a whole lot about the resale value of the car, etc. etc.  Well, karma's a bitch. 

Our driveway is a tricky one.  Incredibly steep and lined on both sides with obstacles. 

It is almost impossible to tell how steep it really is from this picture.  A person can't really walk up the driveway which is why there are stairs.  Jay and I have made comments from the moment we moved in about how one of us was going to run into the stairs or the terraced gardens on the other side.  I just didn't realize it would be both of them on the same day by me. 

So, here's what happened.  I take full responsibility for doing it, but I'm just irritated I did it.  I started backing out of the garage as usual.  I am stair side of the garage, by the way.   I couldn't turn the wheel enough on leaving the garage since I had pulled to close to the wall the day before.  As I was backing down, I realized that I was far to close to the wall and needed to pull forward and correct.  Of course, I have a manual transmission on a very steep driveway and I tried to pull forward.  No luck, the car rolled back despite the fact that I had my foot on the brake while pressing the gas.  It rolled on the steps.  I tried, unsuccessfully, to pull forward again.  Once again, I went backwards.  I now have two wheels on the steps and two off and nowhere to go.  I can't get out and push it up the hill and I can't roll off the steps because they are getting taller and taller.  It was actually quite a bit scary.  Joe and Tom were freaking out a bit, though I was too.  I finally managed to get it off the steps in a very not pretty way, but somehow went a little sideways in the car and back quickly into the retaining wall on the other side.  

Now, if we weren't selling the car in a couple of years, I would just shrug off the damage as a pain, but not really worth repairing.  However, we are selling the car and we will now need to repair it.  

 This picture is the little scrap left from Jay's bump.  There is also a slight dent. 

Here's mine:

Front passenger, under the door

Rear passenger, under the door.

Rear bumper, where I hit the retaining wall:

I'm very sorry for teasing Jay about his bump.  Geez.  If you notice the steps in the first picture, you can actually see the steps that I scraped on.  They have white on them and I broke the corner off another one.  Here's a closer view: