(Disclosure: I wrote this post in partnership with Kidde, all words and opinions are my own and you can leave a comment at the end to enter the giveaway)
A couple of weeks ago we had our neighbors over for dinner and we kind of had a teeny, tiny, small little kitchen fire. Yeah. Probably our neighbors will be declining all further invitations to dine with us.
We were incredibly lucky that we were able to get things under control quickly, although it did take the rest of the night to air the kitchen out. We ended up moving our table and chairs outside and dining al fresco so that we could finish our meal in the fresh air. Like I said, our neighbors are probably totally clamoring to eat with us again. Because when someone invites you over for dinner you definitely want to help put out a kitchen fire and then haul all of their dining furniture into the back yard.
There were two things we learned through this whole experience and one was that we did not own a fire extinguisher. I opened the pantry to grab the fire extinguisher, because that’s where it is in my parent’s house, only to discover that I had a lot of boxes of graham crackers but no fire extinguisher. Turns out, houses don’t just come stocked with fire extinguishers. You have to be a responsible grown up and go buy yourself one. Duly noted.
After hauling all of our fans upstairs to blow all the smoke off my husband mentioned how odd it was that our smoke alarms never went off.
And then I sheepishly pointed to the bookshelf, where the smoke alarm lay mangled on account of how a few nights earlier when my husband was out of town for work, the stupid battery started dying and I ended up having a Phoebe Buffet incident whereupon my smoke alarm would not stop alarming at three o clock in the morning. I managed to disconnect the hard wires but I am so short that I could not get it back in place and had forgotten to ask him to put it back up when he got home.
SO MANY FAILS HAPPENING HERE Y’ALL. Apparently when you are a grown up you need to expand your fire safety knowledge beyond just Stop, Drop and Roll. Seriously, I’m writing that in jest but let me just tell you how fast we got our act together and went to pick up a fire extinguisher and new smoke alarms ASAP after this.
That is also when we discovered that there was not a smoke alarm in our kitchen. The only one upstairs at all was all the way in the hallway and we thought that it would probably be much safer to have additional ones in the front of the house.
I had just returned home from the Mom 2.0 Conference where I had filmed a little video talking about home safety for a brand called Kidde that specializes in…wait for it…smoke alarms. I had put “get Kidde alarms” on my to-do list because they use a 10-year lithium battery that doesn’t randomly go off at three o clock in the morning. So I sent them an email to let them know that I had picked up a fire extinguisher and smoke alarm and that I was going to post about the little kitchen mishap we had and to see if they wanted to host a giveaway.
And they wrote back that they were hosting a fire safety challenge in June and that they would be happy to give away a Kidde Worry-Free Smoke Alarm if I wanted to participate. It was all lovely timing for everyone, except maybe my neighbors.
Kidde makes Worry-Free Smoke Alarms for each room of your house, I had already bought a new one for our hallway but they sent me one one specifically for our kitchen – they come with sensitivity levels for different areas of your house. I put it in myself so obviously it is really easy to install. We also put in a carbon monoxide alarm because I am serious about how we got real about assessing how prepared we would be in a fire after that experience.
Also here is the deal on the Kidde Home Safety Challenge that they are hosting this month: You can click HERE to take a really quick 10 second quiz. Then, the blogger with the most people to take the quiz on his/her behalf between June 16 and June 30 will win a donation of 150 Kidde Worry-Free smoke alarms for his/her local fire department! Kidde will also donate 100 alarms to the community of the blogger with the second highest engagement, and 50 smoke alarms to third place.
So if you are so inclined, I would love for you to take the quiz here! If you do, please leave a comment letting me know and you’ll be entered to win a Kidde Worry-Free Smoke Alarm!
And in general, I would encourage you to learn more about Kidde here: Facebook.com/Kidde | Kidde’s Simple Steps to Safety page – I really enjoyed meeting them and was really impressed with their products. I wish I had been better about double checking all of our smoke alarms and having a fire safety plan in place before we had a little grease fire, it kind of scared me straight about making sure I am staying on top of that sort thing so I also hope this post gives you a little incentive to double check the status of your own alarms and fire extinguishers.
(Disclosure: This is a sponsored post written in partnership with Kidde, all opinions are my own.)
