Fire Safety

Today we got a call telling us the name of our social worker.  VERY exciting, but now we have to wait for her to call :)  We are dying to meet her and start the interviews!  We also learned some things we have to do for our interviews - or more for our house - before the social worker comes.  We need smoke alarms in the bedroom.  We already have those, so we are good there.  We also need fire extinguishers in the kitchen and the garage.  We would probably never have done that before, but I am glad we are doing it now.  Fire is scary, and sometimes my cooking is scary too.  Fire extinguishers just might be necessary some day  :)  and the spray nozzle on the sink won't do a grease fire any favors!

We also need to have our fire escape plan written out and posted on the wall.  Just like in my classroom!  At school it is on bright orange paper, with a map and arrows, posted by the door.  The same thing is needed at home.  Our agency social worker said it doesn't have to be anything extreme or fancy, it just needs to be there.  To me it seems like a strange request, because there is no fancy fire safety route.  Just down the stairs and out the door.  Nothing too fancy.  Nobody is climbing out our bedroom window - its three stories up in the back, so no thanks.  And the bedrooms that will belong to our children have the steepest roof known to man outside of them, so that isn't happening either.  I guess its helpful if we have a babysitter though.  They would need to know the quickest way out.

When I was little, we had a very extravagant fire escape route.  It involved crawling out the window on to a roof a mile away (or at least it looked a mile away) and then climbing across our garage roof and jumping down off the roof into our sandbox.  Brilliant.   Pretty sure since my parents slept on the main floor, and us three kids were upstairs, one of us would have fallen off the roof and broken something during that process.  But we had a plan, and I felt safe as a child knowing there was a plan.

So David and I will do the same thing for our children (AND our social worker... )  We will have a plan and we will post it.  Regardless of what that little plan says though, if there ever was a fire at our house, we would run through the hottest, tallest flames to get our children out of there, and on the way down the stairs, I can honestly say I will not be checking the plan on the wall :)