Kids don't hear fire alarms
I think I've posted before (but can't instantly put my finger on it), but maybe I meant to but didn't.
Children sleep through fire alarms!
There was some research about this a few years ago that I read and was pretty convinced by - enough that I changed my fire escape plans from "wake the children up if necessary and take them out" to "carry the children out, since they'll probably be asleep".
And I now have independent empirical verification from last night. Our smoke alarm went off at about 1.30am, full tilt, not help-me-my-battery-is-dying chirping. It was going for quite some time - it took me a while to work out which one was going off and then to establish there probably wasn't a fire and then to find something to stand on to disable it. The kids (nearly-10 and 7) slept right through the whole performance, including the follow-up of me banging around the entire house for about quarter of an hour looking and sniffing everywhere for anything that could conceivably be a smoke source.
It's a 5-year-old ionisation smoke detector, bought in a hurry from a local hardware shop where it may have been on the shelf for some time. My guesses for why it went off: (a) dust or insect got in, (b) high humidity set it off (it was pretty hot last night - about 24 C - and maybe moist?), (c) it was getting old and faulty. I'll give it a blow and put it up again. (I have two independent ones.) If I get another false alarm I'll replace both.
So, the kids definitely don't wake up at all with the smoke alarm going off. Also, I was surprisingly (to me) dopey and slow. I'm normally pretty alert during a crisis, but here I was more annoyed that I had been woken up unnecessarily and trying not to wake up completely, long before I'd established for sure that it was in fact a false alarm. This is a habit, I suspect, born of the many years of sleep deprivation when they were tiny. But not a good plan now. I mean, a false alarm was the overwhelming likelihood, but if I don't wake up fully alert for false alarms I won't wake up fully alert for real ones. *yawn*
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/321616.html, where there are
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Children sleep through fire alarms!
There was some research about this a few years ago that I read and was pretty convinced by - enough that I changed my fire escape plans from "wake the children up if necessary and take them out" to "carry the children out, since they'll probably be asleep".
And I now have independent empirical verification from last night. Our smoke alarm went off at about 1.30am, full tilt, not help-me-my-battery-is-dying chirping. It was going for quite some time - it took me a while to work out which one was going off and then to establish there probably wasn't a fire and then to find something to stand on to disable it. The kids (nearly-10 and 7) slept right through the whole performance, including the follow-up of me banging around the entire house for about quarter of an hour looking and sniffing everywhere for anything that could conceivably be a smoke source.
It's a 5-year-old ionisation smoke detector, bought in a hurry from a local hardware shop where it may have been on the shelf for some time. My guesses for why it went off: (a) dust or insect got in, (b) high humidity set it off (it was pretty hot last night - about 24 C - and maybe moist?), (c) it was getting old and faulty. I'll give it a blow and put it up again. (I have two independent ones.) If I get another false alarm I'll replace both.
So, the kids definitely don't wake up at all with the smoke alarm going off. Also, I was surprisingly (to me) dopey and slow. I'm normally pretty alert during a crisis, but here I was more annoyed that I had been woken up unnecessarily and trying not to wake up completely, long before I'd established for sure that it was in fact a false alarm. This is a habit, I suspect, born of the many years of sleep deprivation when they were tiny. But not a good plan now. I mean, a false alarm was the overwhelming likelihood, but if I don't wake up fully alert for false alarms I won't wake up fully alert for real ones. *yawn*
This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/321616.html, where there are
comment(s) not shown here.