2 a.m. wake up call

Let me preface this post by saying that I love smoke detectors. I know they save lives and property and they are a fantastic invention.

That being said, why are they so dumb? Crit woke up Tuesday night at 2 am because he had rolled around the crib and got stuck in a corner. I went into his room and wrapped him up and rocked him for a few minutes. That's when it started. The dreaded low battery, high-pitched, chirping noise every homeowner has come to hate. Each time it went off (every 18 seconds), the baby would startle and wake up a little bit.

So I was faced with a dilemma. I could a)keep rocking the baby until he was really asleep, put him down, and then change the battery (I would however be absolutely crazy by then), b)put the baby down and change the battery while hearing him yell at me or c) wake up my sleeping-like-a-rock husband and ask him to change the battery for me. I chose option c.

Mike changed the batttery and went back to bed. I rocked the baby a while longer and then went back to bed. It wasn't three minutes later that the awful sound started again. I was sure it was downstairs and tried to block it out. Contemplating the irony of it, I finally fell asleep a while later.

Yesterday morning we didn't hear anything, so Mike and I assumed the other of us had changed the other smoke detector battery. I put the baby to bed last night and brought the baby monitor downstairs. At 9:15 it started again. The sound was definintely downstairs, but where? We couldn't find the offensive device.

I listened upstairs. Not in Ally's room, our room, or the hall. Not in the kitchen. Surprise! It was the baby's again! (We were hearing it through the baby monitor. That made us feel really smart.) Mike put ANOTHER new battery in and that fixed it. For about 5 minutes. The dumb thing kept on chirping!

I finally disconnected it and brought it downstairs. It didn't have a battery and was no longer wired, but it was still chirping! After a few minutes it quit completely and we haven't heard from it again. I even slept all night last night.

I understand that the more annoying a low-battery signal is, the faster the battery gets changed, but does it have to go off in the middle of the night? Can't they put a little clock in it and have it signal during the day?

It was probably time to replace it anyway, so we'll be off to Home Depot soon to purchase a new one. And it had better only go off if there's a fire!