Are you all caught up on This Is Us? Boy, were the last few episodes before the winter break intense! I won’t spoil the show for anyone, but you’ll learn early on there is a house fire. This got me all hyped up about fire safety.
Did you have a fire safety plan when you were little? I remember firefighters coming to our elementary school and going over “stop, drop, and roll.” My mom says that we had a family fire plan where we were to go on the porch roof outside of our bedrooms if our doors were hot and wait to be rescued. We also a family meeting place in the yard once we were out and/or rescued: the old well house.
Watching This Is Us was a good reminder that we all need to have fire safety plans – even if you live alone! A fire plan was something I hadn’t talked to Mazen about yet, but he is old enough to understand. Hopefully (knock on wood) we’d be able to get to him before he would need to escape all by himself, but as the show suggested, it’s always good to have a backup plan. His room is actually really high up from the ground, and I think he’s a little too young to have a rope ladder in his room and/or know how to use it when he’s in panic mode. Our house is on a big hill, so the front is ground level and the back is high up, so the office, just across the hall from Mazen’s room, has windows he could easily open and jump out of. We have talked to him about feeling his door, crawling under smoke, reaching the office, and how to open the window. He loves role playing, so we practiced a few times too. I will say that he was a little spooked the first night after we discussed the plan. He doesn’t quite understand that this is all hypothetical, so we talked more about why we did the plan the next day.
Our smoke alarms are all hardwired together, so if one goes off they all go off. (I have learned this the deafening hard way with false alarms!) So, I feel pretty safe in that regard. I also have a panic button on my night stand as part of our Simplisafe alarm system that alerts the rescue service with one touch (it’s stuck on the back of my night stand), so I could “call 911” very quickly from bed that way if I woke up smelling smoke.
If you don’t have a hardwired smoke detector system, the Nest line looks really nice. If I ever need to replace ours or if we build a new house, I’d love to get something more modern that has voice alerts and other neat features. I’m also glad smoke detectors have gotten so much more technologically advanced and sensitive over the years. We have a Simplisafe wireless security system (which I love so much more than the ADT one I had at a previous house), and they have a (much less expensive) wireless smoke alarm that automatically calls the fire department too. I might add one of these to each floor as extra “call the firehouse” protection. (Although I am not sure if firefighters will show up if it goes off from burned toast…)
Sorry to get all safety focused on you guys today, but I thought it was an important topic to bring up!
In other hot news, I ironed for the first time in like 5 years. I had this stack of wedding napkins that came out SO wrinkled there was no way to fold them warm and get them straight. It took me ONE WHOLE HOUR to iron them all – they were that wrinkled. Each one took so long to flatten, and I had the heat all the way up. This just reinforced why I don’t iron, and it will probably be 5 more years until I heat the darn thing up again.
And lastly, I fired up the stove top to make a NoBull Burger salad for dinner. Thomas had never had one, and I may have gotten him hooked! We broke it up over salads with manchego, homemade dressing, carrots, peppers, and mango. (Weird combo!)
Charmaine Ng | Architecture & Lifestyle Blog says
Safety first, always! I do need to check out my building’s fire escape route, now that you mention it, Kath…
Charmaine Ng | Architecture & Lifestyle Blog
http://charmainenyw.com
Mom says
Glad you’re working on fire safety with Maze.
Did you get the napkins really damp before you ironed them?
KathEats says
Apparently not damp enough according to Eileen : )
Mom says
Ha! We mothers think alike. We grew up with lots of ironing.
Melissa | HerGreenLife says
I line dry most my clothes (usually indoors on a line in the basement), but it’s especially helpful for cloth napkins (learned the hard way the few times I stuck them in the dryer). Hang neatly over the line, and you’ll get a lovely middle crease when they dry, and no unwanted wrinkles!
Kate says
We had a tree in the front yard we were suppose to meet at. Once, my dad had been using this giant backhoe and he somehow managed to tip it over and it caught on fire… right by that tree. My brother and went TEARING OFF towards it because… that’s where we were suppose to go if there was a fire. OMG my poor mother.
KathEats says
Haha awww
Megan says
A helpful fire prevention tip is to be a very anxious person like me and to go around checking all the outlets to ensure that everything is unplugged approx. 500x before going to sleep or leaving the house.
In all seriousness, a big one is space heaters in the winter. There was a fatal house fire near me a few months back that started from a space heater that was plugged into a power strip. Apparently they’re only supposed to be plugged into the wall outlet directly. Never knew that before.
KathEats says
Space heaters scare me too. It would actually be really convenient to plug ours into the computer power strip under the desk, but I must have known this rule in the back of my mind because I plug it into the wall on the other side of the room instead.
Bri says
We have the nest fire alarms (and thermostats which are also really cool).. Love knowing we will be alerted immediately if a fire starts so hopefully fire department could get there in time to rescue our dog if we aren’t home!
Mary Livesay says
Great fire safety tips. Where we live we also have to consider earthquake preparation, hand crank radio, water, flashlights, dog food, canned goods, and safeguarding furniture to the wall. We are in a ranch so our fire safety is pretty basic.
Katie D says
We had a fire scare this summer, when our water pump over heated, melted some wiring and ignited! We quickly evacuated but with 2 kids 3 and 1.5, I didn’t know how to contain them safely outside the house. I ended up buckling them into their car seats and parking across the road, out of the way if the firefighters.
My best tip is to treat each occurrence of the smoke detector going off as a fire. Even burnt toast gets our house evacuated because I want to teach the kids to honor the alarm and get out, not look for a parent, ignore it, think it’s just someone cooking, etc.
KathEats says
That’s a great tip to use any toaster incident as practice.
Jennifer Valdes says
We use Livewatch which is similar to yours. We love the functionality. We have our lights, doors, and garage door also controlled by the system. We had ADT many years ago and would never go back. I can only imagine the new things that will continue to come out.
Anita says
Great post as always Kath. I don’t want to take business away from the cleaners so I let them do the ironing
Jolene (www.everydayfoodie.ca) says
I have never heard of a hardwired fire alarm system, and I LOVE the idea of the panic button. I am going to look into this and see if we have something like this in Canada, and in my province.