dear readers,
today i am going to give you a valuable life lesson. i will title it: sleep with your pants on or sleep with pants next to your bed. and a shirt for that matter.
at the risk of venturing into tmi territory, i will just say this, i tend to get warm when i sleep, so i like to sleep just in my undies, so that i can stick my leg out from under the covers. it's my own little self devised air-conditioning/venting system (patent pending). it's really great. supreme comfort.
but when the fire alarm starts shrieking "WARNING FIRE" at two forty five a.m., and you and your husband shoot out of bed...and when husband runs down the stairs in just his boxers, all heroically like the imaginary firefighter that he is, all the while screaming, "GRAB THE BABY!!!" and you run into the baby's room, scoop him up, and bound down the stairs, prepared to dash out of the house while husband tries to find the source of the fire or smoke, you really don't have time to consider the fact that you are still only in your underwears, and what a sight that will be.
yes this is a true story. yes this happened last night. no there was not a fire. thankfully we did not have to go outside in our undies. but yes, i hovered around our front door, comforting a startled baby, and yes we were both without pants. and yes, we were terrified, especially since i had read the article about the 18 elite firemen who died fighting the wildfire in arizona right before going to sleep. it took a while to calm back down and fall asleep, as we lay in bed, conjuring up phantom smoke smells, and as my imagination ran wild, like anne of green gables wild, analyzing all the different possibilities and how we would get alexander out of the house if the fire had been such and such a way. i wish this on nobody.
but tonight, i will lay a pair of pajama pants next to each side of the bed so that we are prepared next time. tuck this away for your emergency preparedness box. this is something FEMA doesn't tell you about, but i have lived it. if and when you flee for your life, you will want to have pants on.
and that is tuesday's life lesson.
One of the most common injuries in disasters are foot injuries, mostly from people stepping on glass. Emergency preparedness trainers always tell people to have old shoes or rubber soled slippers next to bed. You can run if you're naked, you can't run if your feet are cut and bleeding (imagines Grace walking to closet and finding suitable footwear to place next pajama pants).
ReplyDelete