It is now 4:53. A.M. I should be sleeping. I just had a wonderful five day trip to Lake Erie with the family. The kids will be tired and grumpy today. I now, will be tired and grumpy today as well. I will take the day minute by minute and yell by yell I guess.
Why am I up tonight? Some may read this and blame my beeping carbon monoxide detector. I, however, blame FireMom. As I was drifting off to sleep last night, my last thought was “We have been gone for five days. FireMom says that I need to check my smoke detector batteries if I have been gone for three days. I guess that beeping you hear every minute when your battery gets low does not beep indefinitely! I then had to decide if I would check all my detectors before bed or go to sleep. I turned over and went to sleep thinking the odds were on my side. It is 10:45p.m.
4 a.m. comes around BEEP BEEP BEEP. Up I jump and start the “which alarm is it” game. I deftly detect it is downstairs and get to the living room when it STOPS beeping. So I am up. I have no more beeping. I naturally grab my laptop and do some very important AVON work (aka shopping). Then BEEP BEEP BEEP. So off to the kitchen I go.
Have I mentioned that Hubby is tall? Like 6’4″ tall? He hung the smoke detector in the kitchen so high, that even with a chair I was using an empty Sun Chips box to knock it off the wall (quietly mind you, the children were sleeping). So I change the battery and all is well.
BEEP BEEP BEEP. Damn Damn Damn. I changed the wrong one. It was the carbon monoxide detector. So I change those batteries. Then in my sleep deprived state I start wondering if the alarm was actually going off or if it was the batteries. I can envision the whole family dying because I changed the batteries when I should have gotten everyone out of the house. So I read the back of the alarm. Test it. Pray for no more beeping. But now I am really wide awake.
See I told you it was FireMom’s fault.
Congrats to FireMom, 2010 BlogHer Voices of the Year finalist!
All joking aside...Reasons for changing your smoke detector batteries.
Photo Credit Mandy W. 2010
You are a better wife than I would have been. I would have woke up the tall husband to change the batteries.
I LOVE THIS POST. I’m going to link it in future reminder posts. You are welcome.
(And thank you.)
[...] short: Change your batteries. Now. Or when your smoke detector starts beeping in the middle of the night, you can think back to this post and say, “Gee, I should have listened to FireMom.” [...]