Parenting Mishap #1 - Results

Since most of the regular readers have chimed in, we'll cough up the story. Here we go...

Things started innocent enough. We decided to sterilize all the pacifiers on the stove in a pan of boiling water. And of course the next part is fairly obvious...we forgot about it.

The water boiled, boiled, boiled, until it was no more; the pacifiers melted, melted, melted, until the plastic was no more. Next came the black, nasty, smelly, disgusting smoke.

We probably would have been alerted to it earlier had we returned the kitchen smoke detector to it's rightful home on the ceiling, but since that thing goes off about every third time we cook, it often lives on top of the kitchen table. Instead we had to wait until the smell made it all the way to the back of the house where Audrey was being fed.

Now, you'd think smell of even a little smoke would cause us to jump into action, but unfortunately that smell isn't all that uncommon here. Our downstairs neighbor is a very nice guy, but he has two habits that aren't our favorite: he plays video games until 3:00am with the volume turned up to eleven, and he sits outside and has a few cigarettes every day. So, normally our first whiff of smoke is met with a roll of our eyes and a few snide comments between Kelly and I. However, this time the smell got worse and worse.

We quickly quarantined Kelly and Audrey in the back bedroom where the air was the cleanest, opened all the windows and doors, and turned on all our fans. Unfortunately "all our fans" consists of two weak fans that look pretty, but don't do much. I tried to drum up a few extra fans from our neighbors, but nobody seemed to be home on a Thursday night. There must have been a block party that we weren't invited to.

There was one fan that we had yet to turn on, but that was a bit of a logistical difficulty. A quick panicked phone call to our friend Dave netted us a huge box fan and a ladder to get up on the roof and uncover our winterized swamp cooler. With a flick of a switch, we had massive volumes of 20 degree air rushing in from outside. The smoke cleared out and our house cooled down extremely quick. Hence, us dressing Audrey in the warmest clothes we could find.

Lessons learned:

1. Smoke detectors live on the ceiling, not on the kitchen table.
2. Table-top sterilizers live on the table-top, not in the closet.

So, that's it. No harm done, just an eventful evening. Needless to say, we felt like great parents and Audrey slept good for the rest of the night.