We traveled to Utah this week for a cousin's wedding. Where we discovered that while Colorado seems to be experiencing a cooler summer than usual, Utah is decidedly not. And also that Utah has way more doughnut places than Colorado. At least our part of Colorado. Why are there more doughnut places everywhere we go than at home? And that Fionn truly believes that thinking about chocolate will help a person get to sleep. Because "If I think of chocolate then I think of eating it and it is so good that I just faint."
On our first morning at the hotel, Kris and I decided to go on a walk while the kids went down to breakfast. Except most of the kids were not even conscious at this point, just Liam and Fionn. So we sent them to their older siblings' hotel room, shook a couple of said older siblings awake and went merrily on our way. Shortly after leaving the hotel I received a fairly cryptic text message from Amik that said "We did not do it." Honestly, Amik doesn't like to waste a lot of words especially when texting and so his messages are frequently somewhat cryptic, I think I asked him what he hadn't done, put the phone back in my pocket and continued on my way. We were already on our way back to the hotel when I looked at my phone again and saw Amik's response "I think someone pulled the fire alarm." Only then did it register that we had been listening to emergency sirens for the past 20 minutes or so.
Amik's need to assure us of his innocence probably stems from an incident when he was 4 or 5 and most assuredly did do it. We were playing in the gym of Kris's middle school on a snowy weekend when suddenly the school fire alarm began to blare throughout the empty-but-for-us building, accompanied by blinding strobe lights. Amik freely admitted at that time to being the culprit, explaining with a shrug of his shoulders that he "just wanted to see what would happen." Well, what would happen is that his younger siblings would cry hysterically and run to their parents in fear, while his older siblings would all cover their ears and cringe at the deafening noise and his father would make a desperate dash across the school to dig through his secretary's desk in search of the number to call and cancel the alarm before a fire truck really did show up. Probably, all in all, a way better show than Amik ever expected. He, by the way, was the only one who remained completely calm, quietly observing the results of his little experiment.
Back to Utah and the much more recent past: we arrived back at the hotel to find several police cars and fire trucks out front, but inside everyone seemed to be going ahead with their free breakfast, no longer particularly concerned by the firemen in their midst. The only sign of Fionn's certain initial panic was that she was still clutching her lion buddy with her at breakfast, whether for her protection or his I am not sure. Apparently what happened was a sprinkler head in the ceiling one of the rooms broke. How exactly this occurred depends on who you ask, but whatever transpired in room 309 before the sprinkler head became detached from the wall, what occurred after was a torrent of water and fire repellent gushing from the front door of the room, into the hallway, adjoining rooms, and pouring through walls and ceilings to the two floors below, accompanied by the the earsplitting screech of the fire alarm... at approximately 7:30 am, BTW. Erin, directed her siblings to grab their shoes, but Fionnula stood in the center of the room crying that her shoes and in fact everything she owned, including her lion, were in the other room (ours), before Erin really needed to address this issue though the hotel staff had determined the issue and shut down the alarm.
That night Fionn was careful to pack up all her things and place them conveniently near the door in case she needed to evacuate for any reason and for the rest of our stay, there were industrial fans blowing through the hallways, which could be loud, but which also helped to relieve some of the ridiculous Utah heat... and made you feel a little like a movie star when you walked through the gauntlet of them with your hair blowing back.
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