Trick or Treat, Mercury Levels, and a Fire

Finally heard back from the Dr's.  Actually I called them.  Both of the girls mercury levels were with in normal range!  Praise God!  Thank you for the prayers!

We decided for the first time to hand out candy for Halloween this year.  The kids were still able to dress up and since the weather was FRIGID( 40mph winds with wind chills in the 20's and snow), they were very ok with not going door to door.  Actually we have a policy at our house that once you become a teenager you can no longer go door to door.

We also don't buy costumes, we always make them.  But we did buy one on sale for Little Miss because it cracked us up so much!  And I bought one for like $2 after Halloween a few years ago that Princess wore.

So here are some of their costumes.  See if you can guess them all:

Ice Cream Cone 

Did you guess it?

Quarterback

The most natural Cleopatra ever.

How about this one??

Lineman!

We have a football theme going with most of our costumes.

How are you doing guessing? 

Her shirt says Ceiling at the top if you can't see it.

And that is a pom pom she is holding.

So that makes her a...

CEILING FAN!

And just what every 34 weeks pregnant women needs-

A bright orange shirt to call attention to her belly.

My shirt says:

Go To Your Room!!

So what am I?

30 points to you if you know it.

Anyone??

Ok fine.  I am "Intentional Grounding".

There's the football theme again.

We were all loving the witty costumes this year.  And so easy and cheap to make. Bubba taped a dollar to each ear last year and was a Buccaneer( get it?  Buck an Ear) which is what got all of us on this kick. 

That brings us to our fire

You know, because our lives aren't exciting enough.

The really bad part is that this happened at night after an entire day of cleaning the house to get it ready for a showing this morning.  Talk about a Halloween horror.

Our fireplace isn't operable but we wanted to try out those great gel fuel can things.  So we put a small one in and it worked great!  We thought it would be perfect for our showing.

It worked a  little too great for our set up as the flame was higher than we wanted.

So we tried to put a lid on it to smoother it( per instructions), but as we were doing so the can tipped.

This presented 2 problems:

1. Our fireplace goes all the way down into the basement where they had a place for all the ashes to go and they could clean them out( back in 1900).  So when it tipped it went down into the grating.  Into our basement.
2. Way up in the chimney there were some old newspapers someone had stuffed up there many a moon ago( to stop drafts??).  When the can tipped there was a big flare up.  And all those old, dry papers caught on fire up in the chimney.  And the chimney no longer vents to the outside.  It was cut off at the roof line and ends in the attic now.

Oddly enough, I just told the kids on Weds. where our fire extinguisher was and went through a tutorial and how to use it.  So when we put the fuel can into the fireplace, Bubba got the extinguisher right away, just in case.

He was the one that spotted the flaming newspapers way up in the chimney.

So Bubba sprayed the extinguisher and then Hubby sprayed again a few seconds later when we could still see some flames.

It wasn't until we started seeing something billowing out of  near the ceiling where our pocket doors are in the adjoining room that we started to worry that the fire may not be contained after all.

We also noticed that our room which is directly above the foyer/fireplace was also smoky.

We immediately called the fire department and got everyone out of the house.  I had to wake Little Miss up, a couple of kids just had socks on.  I did have them grab blankets as they ran from the house because as I have already stated up in the Halloween portion of this blog, it was frigid outside.

We had a couple of kids crying and we all went into the trailer to be warmer and then eventually into a neighbors house.

The fire dept. checked the walls for hot spots and found nothing.

It was likely just all the fire extinguisher powder billowing out of the crack and crevices everywhere in the other rooms.

We were so relieved!!  

And then we had the mess in the pictures above to deal with.  

BUT...

Fire extinguisher powder is much simpler to clean up then a broken light bulb! Sissy pointed this out.

The powder is just gets everywhere.  And the picture just capture a small frame of the mess.  The powder found it's way around the entire main level and up into the 2nd floor via the stairwell.Not to mention our house smelled like, well, it caught on fire.  Odd right??  

At 2:30 we finally hit the hay and had to be up at 7:30 to get ready for a church event. I was so sore from all the cleaning yesterday though and didn't go.  I still got up and gave the floors another mopping and wiped everything down again.

I really can't complain too much though.  Our house could have burned down or we could be dealing with water and smoke damage.  I will take fire extinguisher powder any day! 

And our showing went fine this morning.  The potential buyer looked at a few houses this morning so don't know what she thought of the rest.  Her fiance had something come up and couldn't come along today so we are simply hoping for a 2nd showing.  

Maybe by then I can get all the powder cleaned up and the house will smell better!

Many Blessings,

The Mama