Our Five-Alarm Daughter

On New Year’s we took the kids to see National Treasure 2 which the boys in particular were wild to see. The only one who wasn’t thrilled was Lillian who was supremely bored. I wanted to go as a family but allowing a five year-old to see a PG movie, even if it was clean and Disney, went against my principles, mostly because we wouldn't have let Grace go to an action movie when she was five. Sigh. I suppose it’s the Curse of the Youngest Child.

But for good or bad we took them all, making plans to go to the 2:25 pm show, but at the ticket booth found we’d missed the economy hour by a measly twenty minutes (they adjust for holidays) so the whopping total for all six tickets was forty-eight dollars. Forty-eight!!!! What?? Of course by then we were rather stuck, it would be easier to withdraw from Iraq than to go home without seeing the movie and by the time we were seated in the theater it occurred to us that even if we’d made the economy show it would have been a difference of a mere eight dollars. Ridiculous. And they wonder why Hollywood’s struggling. But we all had a good time (except for Lillian who was bored) and it had us cheering.

The only thing Lillian found interesting was a scene where one of the characters uses his Macbook to hack into an alarm system. Lillian perked up and said (in a loud and echoing fashion) “HEY DAD! He’s got a computer just like you—did you see that?? JUST LIKE YOU! Can you turn on alarms with your computer? Can you??”

We did a big “Shhhh!” but she was still excited. You see she’s been in this really weird phase where she’s fascinated/obsessed with alarms. I’m not sure where it's come from but one day she started asking me if we had fire alarms in the house and where they were and how they went off and why they went off and what the difference between an alarm and a siren was. A lot of questions.

Then she started noticing them other places too—at Walmart, at the library, at church, at school—every public building we go into has her looking for the fire alarms and I always forgot about it until she points them out to me. "There's the fire alarm Mom—see it? See it? There's three at the front and three at the back."

Then she started into burglar alarms and trying to incorporate them into her body of knowledge. “Why don’t we have them mom? Can we get some? Do they go off if there’s a fire? What if the burglar’s on fire Mom? Will they go off then?”

Then she saw some motion detectors and that opened up a whole new set of issues, “What are motions? How do the machines find my motions? Can they smell them? Can they tell if I'm moving in my bed? Can they tell if I'm happy or sad? Do they protect us from fires? What happens if they go off? Can they tell if there's a burglar making motions? What about fire motions? Why don’t our motion detectors in the garage work? Can we get them fixed?”" And on and on.

It was kind of funny at the beginning but it's gone on for long enough now that the conversation has pretty much run its course and the topic has become thoroughly exhausted—nearly as exhausted as I am though she's still going strong. I’m wondering when she’s going to tire of the smoke detector issue and move on. Probably not as long as there is a car alarm going off in the city someplace.

I guess it’s just funny how you take it for granted that you just know certain things as an adult—like when the kids saw a campaign sign and I had to explain all about campaigning and the political process which opened up issues of elections and the bi-party system and democracy and all sorts of hairy, not-so-easily-explained abstractions.

So you see she was pretty excited for a bit there when she thought that Andrew might be able to set off smoke detectors, burglar alarms, sirens and/or motion detectors with his Mighty Mac. Not quite. Almost, but not quite.