My little hero

A couple of weeks ago we found out we had a hero living under our own roof - his name...Super Owen.

 

This little man proved himself a great first responder and was able to keep his head about him in a very scary, tense situation.

 

Scenario:

Teagan was at the high school for her Ecocars class. Garrett was needing to be dropped off at baseball practice. Reed was asleep in his swing while Owen was watching cartoons. Duncan and Emmett were playing chase and wanting to go outside. I was making rice and preparing to fry some pot stickers for dinner.

 

Garrett was ready to be dropped off, and since the baby was asleep and Owen was calmly watching tv, I thought it would be okay to take Emme and Duncan with me and run out to drop Garrett off and pick up Teagan...we live in a small town and both places I needed to go were less than a mile away from the house - I would be there and back in less than 10 minutes. I turned the stove off, told Owen my plans, put Duncan and Emmett in the car with Garrett and I and headed out to play taxi mom.

 

Everything went off without a hitch and other than being briefly stopped by Teagan's teacher to answer a couple of questions, I was home fairly quickly. I knew something was up when I saw Owen waiting for me in our front yard with a worried look on his face. I got out of the car and saw my neighbor coming out of our house with a fire extinuisher in his hand and I heard the fire alarms in our house going off.

 

Poor Owen was beside himself. Apparently when I turned the gas eyes off, I hadn't twisted the knobs completely to off and instead I had accidentally turned them to high...leaving a pot of oil to heat up on the now blazing eye. That had started a small oil fire a couple minutes after I had pulled away, and once the smoke alarms in the house had gone off and Owen had seen the flames, he ran to the kitchen to put the fire out. He didn't want to reach over the flames to grab the pot lid, so he got a cup of water and threw it on the fire, not knowing that oil fires don't like water thrown on them. The water made the flames jump higher and splatter out farther, rolling up the cabinets, across the kitchen ceiling and in to the living room. So Owen ran to the front room, grabbed the sleeping one-week-old Reed, and ran outside to the heighbor's house to get help. The neighbor was able to throw a lid on the pot and take it outside and the flames subsided and were gone.

 

It wasn't a devestating fire, or even overly damging, but it was big and scary and my eight-year-old Owen handled himself admirably rescuing two of my favorite people. He tried to take care of the fire and when he realized he couldn't, he got all that was important out of the house - the baby and himself. 

The cabinets were scorched and burned, the microwave was toast, and the ceilings looked like a lovely Tiffany lamp shadow design was on them from the smoke and fire damage, but that was it for lasting damage. It could have been worse - much worse.

My little man was my hero that day.

We've since fixed the ceiling and repainted most of it, replaced the microwave, deep cleaned the kitchen from the oil and smoke damage, and we are having a carpenter fix the cabinets for us - so our kitchen looks almost like it did before the fire. But Owen still remembers how scared he was during it and how he was able to overcome that fear and do what needed to be done, I still remember to double and triple check the oven knobs now anytime I use them, and we all had a reminder of what really is important to us and how quickly we could lose them.