Fire Safety

This blog has been long neglected and I don't know if I'll get caught up or give updates as needed. Suffice it to say, we now live in Oak Harbor, WA and have been here since Memorial Day Weekend 2011. Living on Whidbey Island is amazing and we feel like we are constantly surrounded by beauty above and beyond the general beauty that W. Washington provides. Anyway....

We are renting a home (and hope to be here for a while) that has a wonderful wood-burning stove with which we hope to heat our house for the better part of the upcoming colder months. We had our first fire in it this past Sunday evening for fun and it definitely puts off the heat. There seems to be a lot of nostalgia as well when you have a fire going in your house. We are excited about this for sure, just a little worried about our little almost 18-month old Molly.



Because of those concerns and just because it's probably something we should do at some point, we decided to have a "Fire Safety" type FHE this past Monday. I think we were pretty thorough - showing the kids where the smoke alarms are and what the alarm sounds like; talking about crawling if there is a fire in the house, testing a door knob to see how hot it is (I was thinking about Home Alone and The Office while teaching and typing this :); how to open their windows; where to meet outside; how to help each other if needed; etc. Anyway, I thought it was a great lesson/conversation with the kids and they seemed much more attentive to this lesson than many other more typical FHE lessons.

So, once Mary and I felt like we had concluded the info that we wanted to tell them about and after trying to reassure them that the chances of having a fire in our house were slim... the questions began... a lot of "What if..." questions. For example, "What if you both die, then what will we do?" "What if you both die and no one knows that our house burned down, what will we do?" Sarah states, "Should I just walk with the other kids to church on Sunday in my jammies and say 'my house burnt down'?"

None of our children wanted to go to sleep that night... they were very worried about a fire in the house and were very unsure how they would perform if there was a fire and all of the possibilities that could bring about. We tried to reassure them by telling them how many days they had been alive and that they hadn't had a fire yet and it was unlikely to happen. We encouraged them to pray for no fires in the house and to continue to be careful around fire.

Once they were in bed, I realized that I forgot to tell them how flammable mattresses are.... there's always next week!