Let me set the scene for you...

The hour was 6:30(ish). I had just put Asher in bed. Sayer was still just in his pull-up, sitting on the floor reading a book. I was a few minutes into feeding Bart. All of the sudden, our building fire alarm goes off. I'm thinking: "oh geez, nice timing. It can't be a real fire, I'm sure some kid just pulled the alarm on accident. I don't even smell any smoke. Maybe I can just stay here." Then my neighbor Emilee calls to see if I know what's going on. I call the front desk and they immediately tell me to evacuate. Alright then. I call Emilee and tell her it's the real deal. Assuming that the fire is in some remote corner of the building, far from our apartment, I take my sweet time... getting Sayer's jammies on, getting Asher out of bed, telling him to put his shoes on. Putting Bart in the ergo. Finding Sayer's shoes. Then the security guard was banging on my door, frantically trying to get me out. I had glanced at the laptop and thought "no, it will be fine. plus I can't carry it". When it came down to it, the only things that I felt it was necessary for me to grab, were all the boys' blankies, and Bart's binky. Oh, and my wallet. Awesome, right?

Nate was in class (of course), so the security guard helped me. He seemed at little frantic himself, so I asked him where the fire was, and he said it was one floor down from us. Ok, so not as far as I thought. By the time we got to the 6th floor, I heard another security guard say the fire was out, but we had to keep going. When we got outside with all our neighbors, and were able to look at the building, we saw that the firetruck ladder was perched up at our old apartment, the one that is directly below our current apartment. Awesome. We didn't see much, as we were some of the last people out, but apparently there was quite a bit of smoke coming out of the french doors to the balcony. Thankfully, the fire department got here within minutes and the whole thing didn't seem to last too long. Although we were still outside for about an hour. Good thing it wasn't still pouring rain like it had been about 45 minutes earlier. My neighbors were apparently a little more concerned about the real fire in our building, because my one friend brought her girls outside in nothing but their towels, having just grabbed them from the bathtub. Emilee brought her boys out half dressed and in no shoes. Once I found out where it was, I felt really stupid for moving so slowly, and VERY thankful that it wasn't a bad fire. It's really scary to think about what could have happened. But anyway, hopefully there wasn't too much damage done to their apartment. I am still not sure what happened, except that when we were in the elevator on the way back up, their next door neighbors said it started in the oven.

The good news is, (besides the fact that we are all totally fine) I think the extra hour of running around totally wore the boys out even more, so they all fell right asleep.