4.03.2010

Early Easter and Septic Adventures

Today, we had an early Easter celebration with G & Bompa. [Do you all know who I'm talking about when I use their nick names? "G" is JP's Mom, Gail, and "Bompa" is his step-dad, Larry.]
We feasted on eggs benedict (with steak), french toast, Larry's famous shredded potatoes, and fruit pizza. After brunch the 5 cousins went outside for an egg hunt, and somehow G managed to snap this photo of all of them together, looking in the general direction of the camera at the same time!
She also got this very sweet one of Ava & Rae:
Tomorrow we will celebrate with my side of the family and the Charlebois. More egg hunts = more candy = more crazy kids!

Unfortunately, JP will not be with us; and here's the long reason why.

Yesterday, Friday, I was home with the kids -- cleaning the house for friends we had coming over and doing laundry -- when I noticed a funky sort of smell in the basement. I followed the stench to a storage space we have under our kitchen and found that the septic system had backed up and flooded the storage space. The whole place stunk like a port-a-potty. I soon discovered that the laundry room was also flooded and had soaked the carpet outside the door. I was immediately overwhelmed and quickly reached freak-out mode. Trying to keep two curious children out of the poo-water wasn't helping the situation.

Not having any idea what to do, I called JP. He told me to check the electrical box and we discovered the pump breaker had blown, which was an easy fix. His hands were tied at work and he couldn't make it home to help clean up, so he immediately started calling people to see if someone could come help. My two heroes of the day were my brother Joe and JP's mom, who both made the long drive up to help. G watched the girls for me while Joe and I tackled the mess. It didn't take too long to clean up, and they were both headed home by lunch time.

After that, we didn't seem to have any problems. Nothing else seemed to be disturbing the plumbing and there was no more flooding.

Until today, when I tried to do laundry again. And the exact same thing happened. Again.

So, JP and I spent our evening cleaning up more poo-water and trying to find the true root of the problem. He thinks he knows what the problem is, so tomorrow (Easter Sunday) he will be staying home to find/fix/replace the problem.

It's not the way we hoped to spend our Easter holiday, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

Really, there are a lot of reasons to be thankful:
1.) the second incident wasn't as bad as the first one
2.) the girls were in bed the second time
3.) I'm married to a handyman
4.) my handyman was home
5.) we have insurance
6.) it happened on a weekend (albeit a holiday weekend) instead of during the work week

So even in the literally stinky situations, God still takes care of us.

Happy Easter to all of you!

1 comment:

Brenda said...

BLECH!!! I can't even imagine...yuck. How did you manage to clean up the crawl space? Me, I would have freaked from the claustrophobia + sewage. Were the items in storage ruined? What did JP think was the original cause of the problem? I give major MAJOR props to you Audra!!