¿En Fuego?

At 1:15 am, the smoke alarms in our house went off. Because these kinds of things never happen at reasonable hours of the day, like 8:00 am. Jeff and I sat bolt upright, and Jeff promptly got out of bed and made his way to the bedroom door, ready to fight fire. I, on the other hand, just sat there. Because, I had no arms.

In the few seconds it took me to clear the sleepy fog from my head, I realized that I did, in fact, have arms, but they were both asleep. Fortunately, that little disability cleared up quickly, and I was able to join Jeff in the kitchen to assess the situation. He already had every light on and was inspecting the various cooking implements. There was no smell of smoke, but we were pretty unsettled, so we began a room-by-room search of the house, including the attics, and we even took our pajamaed selves outside to inspect. Just as we were about to declare the whole thing a mechanical malfunction, the alarms went off again. So, we searched again. When we still didn't turn up any smoke or fire, we began frantically looking for the owner's manual and searching online to see if we could determine, by the secret code of flashing or non-flashing lights, which smoke detector was impaired. It was another fruitless search. After a few more brief bursts of noise, the alarms finally fell silent, and we decided to call it a night. Sadly, all of our children died in this fire drill. Not one of them roused their sleepy little heads. Which is great, since it turned out to be a false alarm. But, seriously, not one of them managed to even groggily ask what was going on, which was maybe more unsettling than the thought of a fire in the first place. Today, there will be a mass changing of the smoke detector batteries, if anyone is looking for a good time.