In my last post I alluded to a week that I thought was busy. Oh if I only knew what was to come.
My last post was about E’s first day of school, which was a Wednesday. That same day I was dealing with a lot of side effects of the Covid vaccine - I had a fever and complete body aches all day, which was mostly annoying and stopped me from accomplishing as much as I would have liked, especially since it was a day with all three kids out of the house (the first in a while!)
F seemed fine that morning, with no trace of a fever, so we sent her to daycare and she was good there all day. We had the impending move from the house the upcoming weekend, but we were figuring it out. Some spray foam insulation needed to go in on Friday, so I’d booked us a hotel from Thursday to Sunday which would allow us to move in Friday morning as soon as the kids were all off to school. That was Tom and I would be able to work from the hotel all day, pick the kids up like normal, and spend two nights in the hotel before moving back home.
And then Thursday happened.
The first sign of trouble was the town department of water pulling up to our street and walking all over our neighbor’s yard. DPW was there as well. Almost immediately we got a notification about possible E. Coli in the water and to stop using it immediately. And then my phone rang and daycare was telling me that F was really sick.
I jumped in the car and ran to the nearest grocery store in the next town over, and grabbed all the water I could fit in my cart and still manage to push it through the store. Next I headed to daycare to collect a very sick and angry baby. The entire time my phone was going nuts with notifications, one after another. A boil water order for the town. Messages from the school and superintendent letting us know that they’d dumped all the children’s water bottles and given them bottled water. Shortly after they closed school completely for Friday. Whelp, we managed to get two whole days of Kindergarten in.
In between trying to finish our work day and dealing with a sick baby, Tom and I made the decision to pack up and head to the hotel Thursday night. We already had it booked, and it was in another town which had clean water, so why not? The only reason we hadn’t wanted to do that before (besides having a better night sleep at home) was that we’d wanted E to be able to get on the bus at home. Now that school was cancelled, that wasn’t a problem.
So we packed the house as quickly as we could, and I headed off to grab the remaining children and check in to the hotel. Tom had the baby, and then later that night he had to wrangle the cats and take them to a friend’s house so they wouldn’t be exposed to the toxic fumes in our house. One of them puked all over the other one on the way - we’re unsure if it was from the car or the water, but either is possible.
The rest of the weekend was just one big inconvenience. The children don’t like changes in routines, and we’d just gotten back from a big trip, so they were already thrown off. Add in a new school year, and it was just rough for all of us. Everyone melted down at one point or another. Then to top it off, the baby ended up with all the symptoms of an E. Coli infection. She had an off and on fever, she wasn’t eating, she was extremely upset, had a bunch of nasty diapers, and then to top it off threw up ALL OVER the hotel room.
All I can say is, at least I didn’t have to worry about cleaning it out of our carpet at home?
As scary as it sounds, there’s not much you can do to treat an E Coli infection - you pretty much just let it run its course. So while trapped in a hotel, we had one very unhappy baby. Our pediatrician assured us that she looked great, was healthy, and we were doing everything right, she was just going to be miserable for a while. Great.
The whole thing was a lot, but we survived. We were able to move back in Sunday, were given the all clear on our water, the work that needed to be done on the house was finished, and F was finally starting to feel much better.
I told E that I never wanted to do any of that ever again, and he said “Well.. I don’t want F to get sick again, but I want everything else to happen again. It’s tiring, but being tired from having fun is better than being tired from a sick baby.” Guess that means they had a bit of fun?
