!?! At Midnight

At midnight a few weeks ago all was silent in the house (except for me and the History Channel), when I heard that super obnoxious sound that always seems to begin at the evil hour of midnight.

It was the chirping of the smoke alarm in our great room. The one with the ceiling so high I would have to go and fish the ladder out of the garage to change the battery.

So I did what any normal wife does-I nudged my husband until he was awake enough to hear the chirping himself.

He roused himself out of a sound slumber and went to change the battery. I came out to watch and offer all of my helpful tips and hints. Definitely appreciated, I'm sure.

The battery was changed, we trudged back to bed when the chirping resumed.

What!?!

After some muttering under his breath, Burke got the stool back out to "take another look".

I offered some more helpful tips, got some more muttering in response, and decided it might be better to keep my helpful ideas to myself.

As he was checking it all out, he pulled the alarm down a little more to take a closer look. Unbeknownst to us, there is a default type setting that makes the alarm go off when one of the electrical connections becomes loose or disconnected, or generally unhappy.

All I know is that within about 3 seconds, all the alarms in the house are going off at the same time.

@*%!@?!!!

Burke and I desperately try everything we can think of to get it to turn off, but are having no success.

We then start looking through all the "house stuff" to see if we can find the instruction manual to figure out how to shut the stupid thing off.

No luck.

Then we boot up the computer to find the website to the company and see if they have any suggestions.

Still no luck.

Just when I was about to perform an exorcism,

my husband figured it out, reconnected the offending electrical wire, and everything was silent again.

Silent?!

Yes, all four of my children slept through the whole thing! About 8-10 minutes.

Now that is really scary.

The next night for FHE we talked about the alarm and asked them if they had heard it the night before. Annika, Kade, and Nathan had, but they said they were too tired to get out of bed and see what was the matter.

HUH?!?

We decided that was going to be the topic of our FHE. We talked about the smoke alarm, what to do if you hear it, how to get out, how to open their windows (no Annika, you can't open this just to say hi to your friends), and where to go to wait for help.
We did the drill four times, so hopefully they got the message. The kids fair we went to (a few posts down) had a really great trailer from a local fire department that taught the kids about fire. It had some kind of smoke that filled it up, then the exit door was hot, so the kids had to crawl through the thick smoke to get out the window. The kids said it was kind of scary, but I am so glad they did it.
What really scares me is not knowing if they know what to do when it really counts. We will keep working on it.