In case you have ever wondered just how fast you can get out of bed in the middle of the night when you home alarm system starts wailing, I can tell you this… Seconds!
Last night, at about 1:50am, while Toronto was in the midst of a very windy weather “situation”, the home alarm that we have on to, you know, keep us safe, started to wail.
As I shot out of bed, I was met in the hallway by 2 of my 3 children, ready to defend our house from intruders.
The teenager… slept.
I slapped on the lights, ran to the front door… closed. Surveyed the windows… Intact. Raced to the back door… WIDE OPEN!
“Intruder alert!” I screamed. Gather your weapons!
Then the phone rang… alarm company. Wanted to know what’s up.
As my wife spoke to them, I walked to back door to see that there were no footprints in the snow, and no possible way that anyone could enter the house that way.
Did I mention it was REALLY windy?!?
I looked at the door, it was still locked. The force from the wind pushed on the door so much that the bolt slide over allowing the door to fly open.
So we told that to the alarm company, bolted the door back in place and then secured the door was the top and bottom with the extra latches – likely meant for really windy days like last night.
The kids, clearly traumatized, could not go back to sleep. In fact, they “had” to sleep with mummy…
I took them into their rooms while I grabbed a hockey stick and checked the rest of the house, just to be safe.
I came back to sleeping children except of the one child who may or may not get anxious every now and then, and I sat with him explaining what the sound was, why it occurred, showed him that I barricaded the back door so that we could go back to sleep and then sat with him while he quickly, but restlessly dozed off.
As I lay there, wide awake at 2:30am, I thought back to when we first moved into the house and started putting the alarm on at night… One morning I forgot to turn it off, and opened the door and the alarm screeched away. This child must have been… 3 or 4-years-old, and from that day onward for a good year or 2, he would get up, race into our bedroom, see if the alarm was still red (armed) and he would point at it and yell, “red light, red light”, so that we would turn off the alarm in his presence.
He wanted to make sure that never happened again.
It was quite the responsibility for a little child to take on, but that was his thing.
Then again, this was the same child who – after a couple of days of very heavy rain – asked us if he should build an ark so that we could all escape safely…
So the answer to the above question is seconds, and the answer to the question: How fast can you get back to sleep.. That answer is not as quickly as I got out of bed and downstairs… Not even close.
The Urban Daddy® 