It kinda feels like I’ve been a font of negativity on here lately, so I was loath to make this post until I ran through the last few entries and saw that they weren’t necessarily covering all terrible things. In fact the last one was quite nice, about our dinner date night over at The Inn at Burklyn.

And so we’ll wade into this one which is, admittedly, not so great.

On Friday, just a day after we’d created this video talking about how “happy” Daphne was…

…we got a call from the school explaining that Daphne has thrown up three times and what would we like to do? So naturally Jen drove over to pick her up and it turns out she absolutely did have a stomach bug of some kind. We spent the better part of the weekend cleaning/vacuuming up emulsions of pee/vomit/liquified poop off of various furniture.

We kept her out of school on Monday and Tuesday of this week, as the bug hadn’t quite made its exit from her lower intestines. (Everything else certainly had…) Yesterday we agreed that she seemed well enough to go back to school, though. And while she is still having pee accidents, she is at least making it through the day there and giving her parents a short midday reprieve.

While she was home sick we enacted some child labor policies and put her to work stamping card sleeve envelopes.

There was some amount of parental assistance required so as not to end up with permanent purple moose prints all over the table/chairs/rugs/etc.

But I do think she was having fun helping us, as once we finished the stack she grabbed them and started re-stamping them all.

Which we did at least 4 or 5 more times.

I appear harried in that video because, shortly before it was shot, we’d just had the local septic pump guys come out again.

The same issue as last time arose, which set off alarm bells about the state of our septic system. Those concerns would prove to be well-founded (I PUN!) since the guys reported back that the leach field had failed and that I would need to have a new one built.

For those of you who are on city wastewater, this is no small feat. Particularly so in Vermont.

We have to have the soil drilled out and tested, then an engineer will come out and design/confirm the layout, then it will need to be approved by the state, then we’ll have to book excavators to come out and dig/build the damn thing…

All told, initial estimates put this somewhere in the $12,000 – $15,000 range. Now ask me how glad I am that I didn’t just sign us up for a business lease.

The good news is that we live on a huge sandy hill, so we shouldn’t (fingers crossed) require a “mound” septic system, which apparently can run upwards of $40k to build.

Honestly I feel like I’d rather just pay the guys to come out every month for the next 8 years for that price…

Okay, see you soon.

j.s.