The Smoke Detector

One week in October, the firemen came to Alli's school to talk about fire safety.  They taught them how to 'Stop, Drop, and Roll', told them about smoke detectors, even told them to go home and talk to the family about planning evacuation and meeting places.  When I asked Alli about it that night, she didn't say much.  She did say something about smoke being in her room and I told her that it wasn't, and that the firemen were just saying "if" there were smoke, this is what you would need to do.  Well, so much for the fire lesson.

Then 3 nights later, I woke up in the middle of the night to a fire detector chirping that the battery needed to be replaced.  (Why does that always happen in the middle of the night?)  Anyway, I thought if Alli could sleep through it, wherever it was, maybe we could just deal with it in the morning.  Well, that didn't happen cause about 30 seconds later she woke up crying.  I went into her room and realized why.  The smoke detector that was mad was the one in her room.  So, I just picked her up and told her she could sleep in our room until we fixed it in the morning.  All seemed fine.....until the next morning.

We fixed the battery, but Alli was scared of it.  She was scared of the smoke detector, scared of her room, scared to go anywhere in the house by herself.  We've had several conversations with her about the smoke detector and how it was our friend, how it protected us, and how it was happy and there was no smoke.  Didn't help.  For the last week, we've had a horrible time at bedtime.  She's scared in her room, so she stays awake.  And if we do get her to fall asleep by rubbing her back, she inevitably wakes up about 5 minutes after we've left and starts screaming.  Our next step was to try to set her up in our spare bedroom, but that wound up failing as well.  I finally relented and we started putting her to bed in our bedroom and that did the trick.  Ugh.  So, crowded once again in our bed, but at least we were getting a fairly good night sleep.  Until this weekend.  For some reason, she started wetting the bed and not waking up!  I woke up both times to find *myself* a little wet and realizing it was from her.  Yuck!!!!  And changing a King size bed in the middle of the night take much longer than changing a twin!!!  That was it - I told her last night at 3:30am that she was no longer allowed to sleep in our room.

So, now we had to figure out how to get her to make peace with the smoke detector (or smoke protector as she calls it, even though she's scared of it).  We decided to cover it with paper.  So Alli drew a smiley face on a sheet of blue paper, and I climbed up a ladder and fastened it to the ceiling around the smoke detector.  I made sure the paper did not actually touch the smoke detector, nor blocked smoke from being able to reach it.  Then Alli said we needed more paper.  Uh oh.  So she got another sheet and I just hung it from one side so it just dangled down.  Then another sheet the same way, and then finally one more.  She said that it was good and it made her happy.  Well, okay.  Time to give it a whirl!

Tonight we put her in her bed and didn't say a word about the smoke detector.  She didn't either.  Kim rubbed her back until she fell asleep, and now suddenly, we think we have a normal night!  Keep your fingers crossed!!!