The other day I was rushing down our stairs when the thought occurred to me, "What if I fell down the stairs and knocked myself out? What would happen to the girls? How long before Kyle came home and found me lying sprawled at the bottom of the stairs?"
From my first days as an at-home mom, I've been terrified of what would happen if something majorly bad happened to me while I was home alone with my children. So of course, as soon as I felt like Dacey was old enough to understand, I started teaching her how to call 911.
The hurried trip down the stairs inspired me to run a refresher course with Dacey on the logistics of the 911 call.
Me: Dacey, do you remember what to do if there is an emergency and you need to call 911?
Dacey: First, find the phone.
Me: Where is the phone?
Dacey: On your nightstand.
Me: Good. Then what?
Dacey: Dial 9-1-1. (She picked up the phone and showed me the numbers.)
Me: What button do you have to push first?
Dacey: The green button.
Me: Good! Okay, now remember, you should only call 911 if there is an emergency in our house, like if Mommy fell down the stairs or fell off of a chair or a stool (we have high cabinets, okay? Kitchen acrobatics are not unusual around here) and if it looks like I am asleep but you can't seem to get me to wake up . . .
Dacey: Or if you have pink eye
Me: Or if I . . . wait. WHAT? No! No, you cannot call 911 if I have pink eye.
My mind flashed to our first accidental 911 call. The child who called 911 was not the one who had been instructed in the ways of 911. No, it was the newly one year old Little Sister who adores the phone and who, in an unsupervised moment, had managed to push just the right buttons to summon a nice-looking young officer of the law to our home in our new community.
My face had flushed bright red as I stammered out that we were all quite fine and it must have been my daughter and I'm so very, very sorry. He narrowed his eyes a bit and asked, "Are you sure?" as if to make sure that I wasn't hiding some horrific catastrophe behind the only partially opened front door. Truth be told, there probably was a horrific catastrophe in our living room, but it was more of the stuffed-animal-littered-floor-and-piles-of-clean-folded-un-put-away-laundry-everywhere variety rather than anything involving blood, weapons, or paraphernalia of one kind or another.
I returned to the moment at hand and explained with more detail and more emphasis to Dacey exactly what sort of situations merited a call to 911. When I felt slightly more comfortable with her grasp on the concept of emergency, I changed the subject, but not before wondering how long it would be before our address was flagged as The Cry Wolf House.
Meeting people and making friends in a small town can be an overwhelming and intimidating task. I suppose, however, if worse comes to worse we could always resort to summoning new friends via an "accidental" call to the good people of 911.
This post is my submission to my friend Jamie of Steady Mom's 30 Minute Blog Challenge. Post time, start to finish: 28 minutes (with much gratitude to Sesame Street).
photo by EMS_EMT
