Fire!

Both kids have been studying a fire safety unit over the last few weeks. Eli and Maddux each have special fire safety workbooks and they are scheduled to take a trip to the local Fire Safety Village. (If you don't know what this is, seriously cool. We had nothing like this when we were kids! It's a series of buildings and streets designated to teaching fire safety (and bus safety, and street crossing safety, and and and) procedures.)

Eli's main assignment was to draw a floor plan of his house and complete a fire safety plan. Then, he had to put his family through a fire drill to practice that plan. We've talked as a family about this before, so Eli was pretty well-informed about what to do, but we'd never actually gone through a drill. He insisted that we all go to our rooms and wait for him to blow a whistle and then follow our procedures exactly. He even wanted us to put Ruby in her bed to practice getting her, but I vetoed that given her likelihood to be less than excited about being dumped into her crib a good hour before bed time.

Eli blew the whistle and we all followed our plan, leaving the house through our assigned exits and meeting at our safe place. Once we finished that, he wanted to practice what we'd do if the kids couldn't leave their rooms because there was a fire in the hall. While we didn't actually climb out of the windows, we did have the kids stay in their rooms and go to the window to wait for an adult on the outside to give the all-clear.

Once all of THAT was done, Eli then reminded us that we need to do it once/month to remember what to do. Love that boy.