What in the.....?????

What is the last thing that a person who is a freak about fire wants to hear? Their smoke alarms going off.

Sunday afternoon Conal was asleep and I was laying down with Macy (half asleep) when all of our smoke alarms started going off. I have to say---they were SO LOUD. Well, of course Conal and I JUMP off the bed and start running around the house to figure out were the fire is and get the kids out of the house. Conal hollered down the stairs for the older 3 to go out into the backyard as I picked up Macy in one arm and ripped a sleeping Jackson from his bed in the other arm and ran down the stairs and into the backyard. After a thourough inspection of the house (including the roof) we all came back inside a little on edge. The alarms were still going off and we could NOT figure out how to get them to stop. Conal was trying to figure out if there was a button or something on them and as he was feeling around one of the smoke detectors, they stopped just as suddenly as they started. We still can't figure out what that was all about. It even happened again yesterday evening. I hope this doesn't happen again, especially in the middle of the night. I don't do well with fire issues........especially in the middle of the night. Apparently I have "fire issues" and this incident made me reflect on the past and why this is the case.

First, there was the Yellowstone Park incident. We went to Yellowstone the year of the bad fire. We already had plans to go and we were going to be up that way so we decided to go anyway. The fact that the park rangers were always talking about the wind shifting and being prepared to leave certain areas quickly apparently made quite the impression on all of us. Particularly my mom.

I was already having a terrible night sleep. I was convinced that bears were outside of the tent trailer. Really it was the majority of my family snoring due to all of the smoke. I finally had fallen asleep when my mom woke up, flipping the covers off of my dad, yelling something about how the fires were closing in on us and we had to get out of there.

Then of course "the incident" as Mandi and I call it was the most traumatic of all. That was where we were camping over Memorial Day weekend in 2001 and my grandparents motor home caught fire. The only semi-humorous part of this one is the thought of grandpa diving out of the motorhome like Superman..........and that is only funny after the fact.

My favorite fire story (simply because this one is has no danger involved, only serious over reaction on my part) happened less than a year after "the incident" and involved the same people sans grandma and grandpa. We took a short family get-a-way to Las Vegas. Our cousins had come as well but their hotel rooms were a couple of floors up from ours. About 5 or 10 minutes after we had all started to fall asleep, wouldn't you know it but the fire alarms went off. So of course, we all jump out of bed, Conal grabs our suitcases, I grab Garrison (who was a brand new baby) and we go running out into the hall. Other guests were in the hall wondering if they should leave the building or not. Mandi and I were freaking everyone out. I can't remember what we were saying but I don't think that "run for you lives!!!" would have been that much worse. So we (and the others that we could convince to get out) ran down several flights of stairs, with our luggage, in our pajamas, and stood outside a hoppin' Vegas casino waiting for the fire trucks to show up.........and they never did. Why? Because there was no fire. And when we finally dared to go inside the casino to see what was happening, it was business as usual in there. So, there we were----in the casino----in our pajamas----with our luggage. Nice. Our cousins never even vacated the building.