I'm going to go ahead and make a prediction here. Either Gabe is going to be a firefighter, an arsonist, or he is going to be paralyzingly obsessed with fire danger/safety when he grows up. The kid has a thing for fire.
And he has since he's been able to process the things that are going on around him. He loved fire trucks first, which wasn't odd. Most boys do because they are big and red and make a lot of noise. And he's had his Truck Adventures video that I had to find on Ebay because we checked it out of the library as often as they would allow us to for six months. And then there was his Fireman Sam phase . . . .
Interesting side note. Gabe is over Fireman Sam now. But Norah LOVES him. Can't get enough of the show. Every time she gets to pick a show to watch, it's Fireman O'Sam, as she calls him, and has been for about three months now. But where Gabe liked the show because of the firetrucks and the "daring" rescues (it's a Welsh pre-K show that runs on PBS here, so it's not what you'd call intense), I'm pretty sure Norah has other reasons to fixate on it. If I wanted to be optimistic, I'd say she's going to love firefighters in a probably unhealthy way. But if I wanted to be realistic, I'd say she's mostly interested in learning the tricks of the trade from Sam's primary antagonist, Norman Price. Norman is a little delinquent who causes the majority of the problems that Sam has to deal with. I swear, if he had an adequate latchkey system or some reliable adult supervision, the fire department in their town certainly wouldn't need four people in their employ and they'd have little use for the rescue helicopter and other odds and ends that must be depleting the town coffers. And I'm pretty sure Norah is taking mental notes for when she's older.
Anyway, and he's had his volcano phase and presently, pretty much every night, he wants us to light a fire in our fire pit outside so he can watch it. All of these seem kind of normal and boy-ish to me. Fire IS awesome. There's no way around that fact. He's just given himself over to its awesomeness.
But he's also had some kind of, well, darker obsessions with fire over the years. Like when we had to leave the daycare we liked because Gabe couldn't get over the presence of the fire alarm in the room. One day while he was there they ran a fire drill, and the sound of the fire alarm sent him into panic mode. And for six months after that, every day when we dropped him off he pointed at all the fire alarms and then cried fiercely when we said goodbye to leave him alone with the big, bad, noisy thing. Until we finally had to leave because he just wasn't improving.
Then things went pretty normally for quite awhile, until a couple weeks ago when preschool had its F week and fire was discussed. Since then, Gabe has been all about fire safety. Hardly a day goes by where he doesn't ask me some what-if question. "What if a fire traps me in my room?" "What if you and mama are asleep and can't hear the fire alarm?" "Where will we live if a fire burns down our house?"
Last week, he asked Libby that last question and Libby said, "We'd probably stay in a hotel." "What's a hotel?" Gabe asked (we've only stayed in one with him once, and that was over a year ago, so he doesn't have much frame of reference). Faced with having to explain the concept of a hotel to a four year old--think about it it and tell me that is an easy concept to explain when you want a child going back to bed soon--Libby changed her mind and told Gabe we could sleep in his playhouse.
It was pretty cute, actually. He went back into the bedroom and, on their monitor (which we still keep on, not so much because we need to be able to hear them but because they say some pretty amusing stuff up there now before they go to sleep), we heard Norah say, "What her said?" Obviously Gabe had been sent on a fact finding mission and was reporting back.
He's also decided that, in the case of a fire that is burning downstairs while they are trapped upstairs, he will break out the window next to Norah's bed so they can escape. This SOUNDS like a good idea, until you think about a four and two year old plummeting from a second story window into some bushes below. So I took him around the front of the house the next day and showed him how high up his room was, then I pointed out that the window from Norah's old room went out onto the porch, which sloped down some and only had an eight foot drop or so. Still probably a leg breaker, but not AS dangerous. He was entirely unimpressed by that notion and swore that he was sticking with Norah's window instead.
Oh, yeah, this is where that whole candle starting the entire house on fire thing came from, too. I'm just putting that together now--that would have been just a day or two after the fire safety thing at school. Duh, Dad.
Finally, tonight, I just couldn't take it anymore. Most of his fears revolve around the idea that nobody will know if there is a fire. That somehow none of us will realize it's happening until everything but Gabe's room is engulfed in fire. So, when he came down tonight, again, to ask me what would happen if we slept through a fire, I hit the test button on the fire alarm on the stares. "Too noisy!" he said. "See? Nobody is going to sleep through that, and it goes off if we burn something in the oven."
This seemed to put his mind at ease, so he went back to bed. Where this exchange, which has nothing to do with fire, but which amused us greatly happened:
Libby had to inform him that this wasn't an appropriate thing to say--which we have to do FAR more often than can possibly be good. Though neither of us uses this particular phrase enough that Gabe should have picked it up, he does have a knack for hearing something we say once, out of nowhere, and then repeating it a few months later. But I prefer to blame it on the kids at school instead. EVERYTHING is the fault of the kids at school from here on out, I'm sure.
That last little bit didn't have anything to do with fire, but I thought it was worth sharing anyway.
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