Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Sixteen Weeks and a Visit from the Fire Department

Hooray, we've made it to 16 weeks.  I'm not sure why this seemed like a big deal to me...maybe because it is divisible by 4?  Who knows.  Anyway, we're here.  The books says the baby should be able to hear my voice now, and there's a chance I could feel it.  I've been laying really still at night waiting for something, but I'm just not sure.  I've felt a few things that could have maybe been the baby, but I just don't know.  Guess I'll have to wait for it to get stronger.  I'm for sure showing now, although a friend at work told me that if you didn't know I was pregnant, you wouldn't realize I was.  You be the judge.  I actually got a picture taken this week.  I made Chris take it right before we left for work this morning.


Hooray for maternity clothes!  I love long shirts!
And now, on to the visit from the fire department.  So, the saga beings this weekend.  At about 10:30 on Saturday night, our smoke detector in the upstairs hallway goes off.  As I was not cooking and Daisy was not playing with matches, this seemed odd.  It said move to clean air, which to me said UT OH, carbon monoxide (as we discovered that the smoke detector was also a carbon monoxide detector).  All our windows were open, so again, it seemed strange.  I called my brother, Christopher, a.k.a. Fire Fighter LaFleur.  He said that if you look on the back of the smoke detector, it will tell you the beep codes.  Well, it said for carbon monoxide, it would beep 4 times, and we were pretty sure it only was beeping 3 times.  He also said we could take it outside to let it air out, and then bring it back in and see what happened, but if we were concerned, just to call the fire department.  So, we took out the battery and went to bed.

Fast forward to last night.  Chris got new batteries for the smoke alarms, put them in around 8 pm and all was well.  At about 9 pm, the dang thing starts going off again, but this time, it's 4 beeps.  So now I'm like the baby is going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning.  Chris tells me I need to relax, that it's probably not a big deal, but I'm good at being irrational.  He resets it and we go to bed later.  Then, at 11:50, that dang things starts going off again.  So I'm like, we have deadly carbon monoxide leaking in our house and it's going to kill us, Daisy and the baby.  I forgot to mention that we also have an ADT alarm system that includes a carbon monoxide detector, but it's all the way in the basement next to the hot water heater.  This detector was not going off, but as it was so far away, I didn't consider it relevant.  Regardless, I had Chris call ADT to see what the likelyhood of one going off and not the other.  They weren't that helpful.  So, I called the non-emergency fire department number (restraint, right!  I could have called 911 right away and freaked out to dispatch), spoke with a nice fire fighter at Station 1.  He said that since it had gone off twice, it was a legitimate concern, and while they did not like to give advice over the phone, if we were concerned, calling 911 was a good idea.  So I called 911 and a few minutes later, 3 gentlemen from the Aurora Fire Department arrived (sans lights and sirens, thank goodness).  Our carbon monoxide level was at zero.  Chalk this one up to a detector that needed airing out.  He did say, however, that they had seen a lot of similar calls with our brand of detector, and that he didn't like that one.  Moral of the story, it's better to be safe than sorry, but it sucks when the fire department is at your house at 12:30 on a Tuesday night.  At least Daisy got to meet some firemen.  And then she pooped on the carpet.  Thankfully, she waited until they left.

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