Fire Drill...

Do you think you know what you would do in the middle of the night when the smoke alarms start blaring? I thought I knew. Then, at 2 A.M. Sunday, I got a big, fat "F," in fire safety. The "F" stands for fucktard, of course, which is exactly what I acted like a fraction of a second after the alarms started wailing. I started out okay, by punching my snoring husband in the head and screaming "GET UP," but that was the last smart thing I did before I lept out of bed, flung open the door that I should be feeling for heat and ran as fast as I could upstairs to my son's room with three dogs in tow, without so much as smelling for smoke or reaching for a light switch.

Hard to believe that I would flunk fire safety, seeing that I, Lola Ebola, am PREPARED for just about every disaster that can pop up in the home or the car or while I'm walking down the street. Don't all of you have tools for cutting your seat belt and a center punch for breaking car windows in the console of your car? What about kickass first aid kits or water, snacks and blankets in case you get stranded in a snow storm? Oh, and I don't carry a giant purse because they're trendy, you know. I need my supplies just in case.

Since building our house back in 1993, I've played out every single scenario for emergencies; ie, fire, carbon monoxide poisoning, home invasion, hurricane, tornado, just to name a few. We've got an alarm system connected to the police department and the fire department with panic buttons in case an intruder gets past the dogs. We've got smoke detectors that are hard wired into the house, as well as the ones that alert the alarm company to immediately send the fire department, as well as the simple battery-operated ones in each bedroom, cuz, duh, a fire could start in the bedroom and not just right outside the closed bedroom door. Oh, and there are carbon monoxide detectors on every level of the house and outside of all bedrooms and one of those escape ladders in my son's room in case he gets caught upstairs and needs to escape.

My nightstand contains various survival kits, which had to be made a bit more secure after baby arrived, but still include weapons that I know how to use to kill someone if they dare to break in in the middle of the night or, say, incapacitate and subdue them if I'm not in a killing mood. I've got flashlights and fire-resistant blankets in case I have to run through fire to get to my kid. I almost purchased those oxygen masks that the firemen wear a few years ago, but I must have thought maybe that was going a tad bit overboard or maybe I just forgot. Most likely, I forgot.

So, you think I'm paranoid? Maybe. I like to think I'm prepared. I certainly don't obsess about bad things happening once I've put the survival kits and emergency plans in place. We've gone over our fire drills a couple times a year with the boy since he was a tiny tot, decided on our meeting spot outside. It all went to shit, though, when the alarms violently jolted me from some crazy dream Sunday morning.

I forgot to let the dogs out of the french door so they would be safely outside. I forgot to grab my flashlight and fire blankets. I forgot to feel the bedroom door for heat. I simply freaked out, hit the husband and took off screaming into the darkness to save my baby. He's upstairs, and we're downstairs, which has always worried me; hence, the fire blankets, alarmed windows, escape ladder and the survival scenarios.

In the 2.5 seconds it took for the dogs and I to wake and get to the boy's room, me screaming, dogs barking, I thought I'd find the boy standing at the end of his bed, maybe rubbing his eyes a little or scratching his balls while he pulled out the escape ladder. Yeah, not so much. He was sound asleep and only sat up after I screamed to get up NOW. Not seeing any smoke or fire so far, I ran all through the upstairs, sniffing like a basset hound, trying to find the fire and surveying what I could grab in two seconds. I grabbed my steno machine case that also contains a laptop so that I wouldn't be put out of work if the house burns down. Then I ran back to the boy's room, expecting him to be ready to go. He was sound asleep again.

Not only can he sleep through the blaring alarms that are six feet from his bed, but he can go right back to sleep after being told to get up because the house is on fire. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I dragged him out of bed and got all of my "kids" downstairs and out in the garage, since there was a violent lightning storm going on that I hadn't noticed until we got out back. Then I found the husband down cellar, and we tried to find the fire somewhere, anywhere, since the fucking alarms were still going off and there was no smell of smoke. We even checked the attic.

My brain kicked in at that point, and I realized that the smokes that are tied in with the house alarm that will send the fire trucks and the police cars without so much as a frantic 911 call from me were not going off (and yes, these alarms get the entire town to your front door in mere minutes I found out when you burn a bagel or have your hardwood floors sanded.) The cheapo battery-operated alarms weren't going off either. It was just the hard wired, whole house alarms that were shrieking incessantly.

So, we decided that maybe the lightning shorted out something or other, and we went looking for blown fuses or anything that would make the hideous noise stop. Half hour later, after unplugging every detector, we found the one that seemed to be the problem, unplugged it and even had to take the battery out to get the fuckers to shut up. The kids were brought back in, and the boy and the husband crawled back in bed and instantly fell asleep. I was wide awake until 4:30 thinking.

I thought about how grateful I was that this was just a "drill." I went over every mistake I made, and I wanted to puke thinking about how an eight-year old can sleep through incredibly shrill alarms that are supposed to wake him up so he can use the training we've done and survive a fire. Then I got out of bed and ordered this alarm that I had read about years ago and never got around to ordering.

I can't claim ignorance here. When my son was very young, I had read the study about how kids sleep so deeply that they don't respond to much of anything but the sound of your voice telling them to get up. I guess their brains get used to your voice telling them to get their asses out of bed from a very early age, and that's your best bet in an emergency. Being the psycho that I am, what with all of my alarms and survival kits, you'd think I would have ordered one of these alarms way back when and recorded my voice telling him to wake up and repeat the fire escape plans until he was safely out of the house and could hear me in the flesh, but I must have forgotten or maybe I thought three different smoke detectors within ten feet of the boy would work. Now, I know they won't work.

So, my dear blog friends with kids in your houses, do yourselves a favor and read this article, and then go buy one of these for each kid in your house and record your wake-up calls. If you have teens, you can have a little fun and record things like, "We're late!!! Get the fuck up NOWWWW!!" or "If you're not out of that bed in one second, I'm pouring water on your head." The possibilities are endless.

Whatever it takes, please learn from our little fire drill gone wrong. I did.