Crisis Averted: Priceless!

I have decided that one just never knows what will happen when spending time at my children's school. I went in today to take some pictures and help out in DS' class. His teacher had divided the class into groups of 4-5 students and each group formed a business. Each business decided on a product to make to sell. On Sunday several kids met at the store with Mrs. B. to purchase the raw materials needed, and today was the beginning of product production. One group is making notepads. Another is making slime. DS' group is making play dough. A fourth group is providing a service instead of a product----they are offering tutoring. The last group is the one that tried to create a school-wide crisis this afternoon.

The last group is making plastic spoons dipped in chocolate. To do this they needed to melt the chocolate for dipping the spoons into. They first dumped an entire bag of chocolate chips into a plastic bowl, then they placed the bowl in the microwave, and lastly they turned on the microwave. Here is where they made their mistake! I am not sure how long they put the chocolate in the microwave for, but it was definitely too long! I was walking around taking some pictures of the kids working diligently on their projects when I hear DS' voice call out, "Mom! The microwave is smoking!" Sure enough, when I look over at the microwave in the corner of the room, there was a ton of smoke pouring out of it. I called out to Mrs. B. She ran to the microwave and pulled out the bowl of chocolate, opened the nearby window, and held the smoking bowl out the window. DS ran to the other window and threw it open. I grabbed the nearest stack of papers and started waving the smoke away from the smoke detector (oh-so-conveniently located close to the microwave of course!) hoping to keep it from setting off the fire alarm. (Most of the kids meanwhile had the looks on their faces reminiscent of deer in the headlights.)

Luckily we were able to keep the fire alarm from going off, so the entire school did not have to empty out (which would have sent over 700 students out into 12 degree weather!) and the fire department did not have to come to the elementary today. So while it was intended for the kids to learn about supply & demand as well as things like profit margins, they also had another lesson today. When melting chocolate in the microwave, only heat it for short (we're talking like 30-second intervals here!) amounts of time and stir it before putting it back in the microwave for longer. Whatever you do, do not try to do all of the melting in one long segment of time. Instead of melted chocolate you will end up with burnt chocolate and melted plastic.

Cost of worksheets for classroom learning: $0.05 each
Cost of pencils for doing worksheets: $0.10 each
Cost of hands-on learning instead of worksheets: Priceless!

FIRE!!!!

OK, now that I've got your attention.....no, there was no fire at our house today thankfully. But, we had the adrenaline rush of thinking there was! At the lovely early morning time of 4:30am our smoke detectors went off. They are the hard-wired kind so when one goes off, they all go off. This is actually a good safety feature....so that if there was a fire in the basement, the smoke detector going off upstairs on the 2nd floor where the bedrooms are at night would wake us up. Well......would wake some of us up (more on this later). When they went off at 4:30am they shut off themselves after about 30-45 seconds of alarming. DH went downstairs to check things out while I checked out the kids' rooms upstairs. We found nothing to be concerned about (and at this point, having been awakened from a deep sleep, we weren't even entirely sure it was the smoke detectors since they had ceased to alarm by this point), even checking the carbon monoxide detector as well. Nothing. So we went back to bed. Now DH has the ability to fall asleep immediately at any point and in any place. For me on the other hand...not so easy. I was awake for a good 30 minutes waiting for the adrenaline rush to go away and be able to settle back down to sleep hoping that we were correct in assuming that everything was OK. So finally I was back asleep. Then at 5:35am they go off AGAIN!! And this time they did not stop!! DH went all over the house checking things until he ended up in the basement. By the time he got there (and the alarms were still going off) and couldn't find anything wrong, he decided to try taking the smoke detector down there off of the wall (and thus out of the hard-wired loop they are all connected to). At that point the alarming ceased. Now it took several minutes for this all to occur. I stayed upstairs because I thought for sure that the kids would end up waking up and freaking out that the smoke detectors were going off. But did they? NO! Both DS and DD slept through it all....both times! Considering how loud those things are.....we now know how deeply our kids sleep! Amazing. They sleep as deeply as their Dad. I think the only reason DH heard it this morning is that he is suffering from a horrible cold and isn't sleeping well at all....so he's not sleeping as deeply as usual. I think under normal circumstances even he would have slept through it (his parents love to tell the story of him sleeping through the fire alarm at a hotel once while they were on a family vacation when DH was growing up!). Needless to say, even though I went back to bed, I never was able to return to sleep before the alarm clock went off at 6:00am. Guess today DH will have to either figure out why the smoke detector malfunctioned or buy a new one....and I'll have to start praying that if there's ever a fire at our house at night that I'm home to wake everyone up as it seems that not even that very, very loud and shrill noise is going to wake up these guys!