Fire alarm system | Simple. I Just Do.

Since the fire drill about a month ago, The Boy has been watching YouTube videos of fire drills going off, creating PowerPoints where his favorite video game characters are experiencing fire drills, and we have had more than one Fun Friday dedicated to fire alarm inspections of the local elementary schools, with varying success.

On Thursday last week, I picked The Boy up from Kids Club and he had made a couple of fire alarms from construction paper:

It may be difficult to see, but each has a picture of a house on fire (printed from the computer, with the matching color background), and a man running from the house. The dots are the speakers, and the lines indicate that sound is coming from those speakers.

Needless to say, these alarms were promptly “installed” at our house, in the hallway, and in the kitchen:

Don’t ask me how he got up above the sink…

I asked if he’d like to visit a firehouse, and was met with silence (which is Boy-speak for “no”). This too shall pass. At least he doesn’t seem anxiety-ridden about it – it actually seems like he’s having fun. This too shall pass… Right?

fire_alarm (Photo credit: auchard)

I bet moms with neurotypical kids don’t even know when they have had fire drills at school. I bet they don’t even think about fire drills often, if ever.

In our house, fire drills happening at school is huge news. We rarely know in advance, and yet hear about them for weeks afterwards.

The Boy’s school had a fire drill yesterday, and consequently, our Fun Friday consisted of going to another school in the district after kids club to look at their fire alarms in the gym. The Boy found that they did not have the proper coverings (the cage-like covers that protect them from balls and other flying objects in the gym), and wanted to go find the custodian to inform him of the fact that they needed to be covered properly. I suggested that I could email him rather than roaming through a school that is not ours to confront a custodian we don’t know about his naked alarms. Luckily, The Boy was OK with that. It was also lucky that The Boy is a bit of a celebrity in the district, and one of their kids club employees is the mom of one of our kids club employees, so that we were able to enter the school and let The Boy do his thing without anyone raising an eyebrow.

And so, for the next week or so, The Boy will be pointing out the different fire alarms he sees wherever we go, and comparing them to the catalog of fire alarms he has in his head, “Those are like the white ones at the middle school!” As I write this, he is having a pretend fire alarm at the pretend school where he is the pretend gym teacher. “Mmm. Mmm. Mmm,” I hear from the dining room.