CHIRP!

Steve is away for the weekend, so last night when I checked on Evelyn before going to bed I whispered, "Sleep until at least 7:00 for Mommy.  7:30 would be even better!"  It was not meant to be.

Wake up number one occurred around 1:00, when she started crying and calling for Mommy.  It lasted about 2 minutes until she found her blankie/buddy/paci and fell back asleep.  If that had been all I dealt with last night it would have been fine.  But 3:45 rolled around, and I was awakened by the deafening CHIRP of the fire alarm.  There was one beep, that was it.  There are 7 fire alarms in our house.  One in each bedroom and one on each floor.  That was seven possible low batteries, even though according to the one I took off the wall first, a low battery would be signaled by a beep every minute.  Not that I wanted a beep every minute, but at least I would have been able to figure out which one was beeping and that it was really a low battery.  By the way, in my sleep deprived brain I was convinced that we were going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning, not that I was dealing with a battery problem.

I started wandering between the bedrooms because I was pretty sure that the beep had definitely come from upstairs based on the volume.  The bedroom alarms were blinking red, and I would put money on the fact that before this morning they blinked green.  I started to think that they were maybe all connected, and when one goes, they all go.  It's 3:45 remember, and my brain was not thinking clearly that if they were all wired together there would be no battery problem at all because they would be running on electricity.  About 20 minutes later there had been no more beeping, so I decided maybe it was just a freak incident and I should try to go back to sleep.  Try.  Not that I would actually sleep, still being convinced of carbon monoxide taking over my house.

At some point I must have dozed and in my dream an alarm went off and I jumped out of bed and ripped the battery out of the alarm that I left sitting on the night stand.  It wasn't even a fire alarm noise in my dream, I was just that on edge.  At 6:00 there was another chirp and I made the decision to take down all of the bedroom fire alarms and remove the batteries since they were the ones blinking red.  In the process of going into Evelyn's room she bounced up in her crib, "Hi Mommy! Up!  Bookie!" And that was the start of our day.  She was up and could not be convinced that it was still night time.  We got into my bed and did a few bookies.  At 6:30 there was another unholy CHIRP!  At which point, I ripped the last alarm off the ceiling in the hall, tore out the battery, loaded my kid in the car and went out for breakfast.