Somewhat down in the dumps

My poor camera... and I'm reallllllly starting to miss it.  Anyone who really knows me knows that I take a camera to everything that I can.  Less often the more kids I have, but I make an effort.  I'm not a professional, but it's something that I really enjoy and love to look back on pictures I've taken of my kids.  At the beginning of the summer last year it started having problems focusing... but turn it off and back on and voila...it worked.  About Nov it would have problems with it about every two shots.  Finally gave up and started taking it to people to see if they could fix it.  No one could.  One told me it was definitely the lens, so my extremely amazing sister in law lent me her extra lens.  Helped, but didn't fix the problem.  So I sent it in to Nikon to get repaired.  After an amazingly awful 4 week ordeal of trying to get them the receipt again and again and again to show that the lens was still under warranty... and after paying $150ish to fix the body... I got my camera back.  I was so happy and excited I almost started to cry!  (For those who know me... I try not to get overly emotional about things...) I set up my photo "studio" and went to work... I was going to make up for all the last 5 or so months and get some cute pictures of all my kids.  I got about 5 minutes into a shoot with my baby... and my camera comes up with the message "Error: Press shutter release button again". I tried everything I could think of... Changed batteries, sd cards, lenses, turn it on and off several times.  I finally gave up and looked on the internet.  It looks like it's a problem with this little red gear in the bottom of the camera.  Looks like an easy fix... but here's my dilema... Because it's within the first 30 days of getting fixed, it might be under warranty if it's caused by the same thing that they were trying to fix in the first place.  I could send it in, miss it for another 6 weeks and have it back as good as new.  Or, I could send it in, they tell me it's a different problem and ask for another $150 to fix it... at which point I'll just have to say forget it... and we can try to open it up and fix it ourselves and I would still have to miss my camera for another 6 weeks.  Or, I can just try to fix it right now, not miss it for 6 weeks, but that would invalidate the temporary warranty on the fix that they just did.  OHHHHHHH, if I only had an extra $1000 laying around... I would just buy a new camera.  If I were still doing weddings I could say it was worth it... the weddings more than paid for my last camera... but I'm not.  I only do family pictures for people once in a while now too... three kids = no time = no advertising = no shoots.  What to do? What to do?  Here's some of the ones that I got of Evelyn before my camera gave out though... All my best pictures usually come towards the end of the shoot... so it makes me wonder what I could have gotten if my camera had lasted.

And this is what these guys were doing while they were waiting for me...