Surprise Dinner Guests

The authorities paid me a visit again. This time they made a house call right in the middle of dinner.

Instead of it being a California Highway Patrolman racing after me on the freeway, it was the Roseville Fire Department, 3 firefighters and their shiny red truck all in our front yard.

We heard the truck rumble up and I hoped aloud that it might be UPS delivering a surprise package. WooHoo, what could it be?

Michael said that he thought it sounded like a bigger truck than UPS, maybe a even fire truck.

And Lucas excitedly chimed in, "Maybe the fire truck is coming to rescue me!" From what, we will never know? Hey, my dinner wasn't that bad;-).

Michael got up, looked out the window and confirmed that it was a fire truck. No package for me, but still kind of exciting. What is going on? My thoughts immediately flashed to the girls that I had corrected 30 minutes or so earlier for laying in the middle cul-du-sac (eating popsicles and lying in the road--so smart). "Girls, that is not a safe thing for you to do." I prayed that they had not foolishly laid back in the street and gotten hit.

We all jumped up to peer out and see what was going on and were shocked to see the uniforms coming out of the truck and heading up our driveway. What the?

They had received a call from a neighbor in the neighborhood behind us reporting smoke in our backyard. They had even given our address. Hmmm, no smoke back there and I hadn't even burned dinner. Weird. I wondered how neighbors behind us would know our street address, but shrugged it off.

I put it all together just now, hours later. I think that those girls played a prank on us to get back at me for scolding them. They called 911 and reported a disturbance at our house. Would a couple of 7-year-old girls do such a thing? I made lots of prank calls when I was a kid, but never one like that!

They both seem like sassy girls with little adult supervision or respect for authority. They walk around the neighborhood like they own the place, even sometimes peering in our windows, picking our landscaping (flowers) and playing in our front yard. I've corrected them before about these things and wonder sometimes if I am being a mean, crabby woman. The kind that yells at the kids to stay out of her flower beds, but I don't know, I feel like they should know better. I teach my kids to stay out of people's yards. It is not polite to trespass. And come on, we have flowers and pretty things in our yard to make it look nice and to enjoy. Not so that the neighbor kids can wear flowers in their hair and play flower girls by littering the rose petals all over the sidewalk. Pick your own darn landscaping! But I digress...

Well, if nothing else, the surprise fire department visit provided us with some dinnertime excitement! Lucas loved seeing his heroes come to our house.

Now what to do about the sassafras potential pranksters? Making a false 911 call is a pretty serious offense!!