November 18, 2008

After the kids headed off to school and Vic headed off to work, Caleb and I had a fun morning of laundry and errands. We went to Walmart, where I needed to pick up a Christmas gift I had ordered online for him and had sent to the store. I figured I could distract him with a lollipop and he'd never notice. That would have worked great if the lady behind the counter hadn't said, "Oh, this must be his Christmas gift!" Thanks, Walmart lady. So, the rest of the shopping trip I heard, "My gift? My gift? Where my gift? That my gift? . . ." He was still talking about it while we were shopping in Publix afterwards. I think he's forgotten about it now, though, so it's okay.

Grammy brought home Carson and took Jamie back to her house to play. Jamie had fun and worked on her square for her class's Thankfulness quilt. She was also excited that she got a new dot-to-dot book to work on over there.

Vic came home and took Carson to Cub Scouts, only to find out that the pack meeting was last night and there's no den meeting tonight. Oops. That set the tone for the rest of the night.

It is super cold tonight, by our standards, anyway. So, we decided it was a great chance to have a fire in the fireplace. We don't get too many fireplace-worthy nights around here. In fact this is the first time we've had a fire in the fireplace in the 3.5 years we have lived here. It was lovely and warm for about 5 minutes. Then the smoke detector between the den and the kitchen went off.

It is hard-wired into the house, so we couldn't just take out the batteries. It is also very, very loud, which would be terrific if there was an actual fire outside of the fireplace. So, Vic is standing on a chair and I am handing him various things to try and shut the thing up. We tried taping it up, putting a towel over it, putting Vic's coat over it, etc. The highlight of the evening occurred when I looked over and saw all three kids in a line pulling themselves across the floor on their bellies. At first I wondered what they were doing, but I quickly realized that all that fire safety training at school paid off, lol. They heard the fire alarm and were getting the heck out of dodge! About that time, Vic pulled the thing off the ceiling all together, which was effective. Then the upstairs alarm went off. Then, we noticed that there was quite a lot of smoke in the den. Turns out the flue was only part way opened and that's not good enough.

There was also a spilled cup of milk and a knocked over pitcher of water during all of this. I think it will be at least another 3.5 years before we try this again. :)

Off to get the kids to bed now and then clean the soot off the outside of the fireplace. Good times.