Call 911!!!

I will start by saying that I am happy to be alive an thankful to have my family. When I bought the house the ONLY demand I made was that they went out and bought a new CO detector for the second floor. I've never even known any one that had a problem, but it was just something I was being OCD about.

Sunday night we were supposed to ALL go out with some friends. James was being a jerk and I told him to stay home so I didn't have to deal with him and my mom and Kayla decided to stay too. So I took Ben and went out with some friends for dinner.

I got home at 9:30pm and James was still up. He wanted to apologize for being such an asshat. So he stayed up (normally he's asleep by 8:30 because he has to get up at 4:30) with me for a bit to talk. We were sharing a glass of milk, joking around, when an 'alarm' went off (10:30pm). We have HUGE, tall vaulted ceilings (so it echos in here) and thought it was the fire alarm at the top. I ran Ben into our bedroom so that his ears weren't hurting and James went to get the ladder. We couldn't figure out why it was going off since there was no smoke. I called my mom up to take Ben, while I helped James. He pulls if off the ceiling and is like 'this isn't going off'. We realized it was the carbon monoxide detector over by the fireplace. It's an older one so I figured the battery was dead or the sensor was 'dirty' and needed to air out. We put in a new battery and tried to air it out. It stopped after we had it outside for a min (and the door open off the family room, to the balcony).

We go sit back down and relax when the alarm in my daughters room goes off. I freak out and yell at James to go get her and get her outside NOW! I yell at my mom to get Ben outside right away. She was like 'why?' I just yelled at her again to get him out of the house. She wrapped him up in a blanket and headed to the door.

James got K and carried her outside. I called 911 (10:41pm) and gathered up blankets (it was -4 out that night) for in the vehicle. I get outside and we wait for the FD to get there. It's a volunteer dept. so it took them like 20 min. (thank God it wasn't burning down!). I notice a headache, but think it's just stress related.... after all, it's probably just faulty alarms, batteries, something.

A firefighter shows up with a special machine and James and him go inside w/o masks (idiots) to check it out. They're in there for a while and I got worried and texted James to see if everything was ok. He said no, there are 'elevated' levels in the house and 'calling back up'. Then another truck shows up and a bunch of guys get out in all their gear/masks, ect. They go in the house and are in there forever.

Finally I'm told that it's coming from the furnace... this gas was coming through ALL of the vents in the house!! Thank God we had a second alarm in Kayla's room. The first one did start going off again about 20 min. later (we'd had the door open and it cleared out a lot of the gas in the family room), but her room would have just been filling with gas that entire time.

At like 1:00 I tell James I'm going to leave and take the kids to a hotel since they were both tired and needed to go to sleep. We got to the hotel and all tucked into bed about 2am. It was just a really, really long night.

So we've had a ton of service guys out Monday, it still isn't 'fixed' per say. There's no more gas leak, but it will happen again. Turns out Carrier had a recall on their heat exchange things (can't remember the part name), but it isn't public or on their website!! These jerks could have killed my entire family, because they aren't 'vocal' about the recall on a part of theirs! So now I have to contact them and bitch about it. *sigh*

We still had a hotel room for Monday night and are home for good now. I had to go out and get a special detector that gives you the exact read out of carbon monoxide levels in the house and plug it in where Ben sleeps.

Make sure you guys all have detectors!!! I don't know what I would have done if I had lost my daughter or any one else