Upstaging Lil (and her hair fire)

You know, it really is true that being busy makes time go by faster. I never expected, as such a very transient parent, to find myself highly involved in PTA. I also never expected to find a PTA with 50 members at a school with 500 students (being run by about 10 of those 50 members). While getting involved has been big, I must admit I love it. I have missed school, so it's great to be part of one again. I love that the teachers know who I am and the kids recognize me and shout hello when they see me. I'm having a great time. It has kept me from blogging, though.

I've been meaning to come on for a couple of weeks now to tell of an incident at our house. Oklahoma has kind of weird weather. One day it will be a beautiful 70 degrees and the next it's barely 50. On one of those cool days Derek decided to light a fire in our fireplace. We have a gas starter, but no key, so he turned it on with pliers and proceeded to try to light it. He couldn't get a flame anywhere, but I was certain that I could smell gas. At that point we did something far less than smart and held a match in front of the starter. There we found gas. We had a flame shooting up. Scary, but it got worse. Suddenly we had flames coming out from behind the brick facade on the walls on both sides, as well as inside the fireplace. We got the gas shut off and the flames went out within a few seconds, but I'm paranoid, so we called the police station. They sent the fire department over. After running several checks they found no hot spots and no gas leaks, but they recommended that we not use the fireplace (surprise, surprise) until it is sealed.

Our kids thought it was some kind of fabulous entertainment, though. They were enchanted by the flames (we had to keep reminding them to stay back) and thrilled to have a firetruck outside the house and real firefighters inside. In fact, Jon suggested that he'd like to have them return, but Derek and I told him we'd prefer they didn't ever have occasion to. Interestingly, this all happened shortly after both of our school kids had visits from the firefighters (the very same ones who visited us), so we'd been talking about what to do in case of a fire in our house. Obviously, something didn't get through quite right, so I guess we'll have to keep talking.