It was a hot day on 05/23/2013. I left the boys with their grandparents (C's parents) and went to the garage to pull out some cartons for our move to Arizona. The boys wanted to ride their bikes. So the three of us got into a deal - if they behaved till I returned with the cartons, I will take them to ride their bikes.
(A was all excited because it was his first year bike riding and goes all jumpy when I mention the word 'bike'. Last year it was the same with the word 'swimming' - the word swimming made him extremely excited).
Suddenly I looked around and saw both the boys in the garage. When I asked my in-laws what happened? They answered saying, "Oh My God! these boys did not at all listen. They put on their shoes and just wanted to go biking immediately. How much ever and how many ever times we told them that you will scold them, they did not seem to care. Especially the little one. He instigated S to follow. So the start of all this is A." Not so much for promises, huh???
I took it easy and allowed them to help me with the cartons. Both of them helped me bring all the cartons from the garage to the front door of the apartment. There are four apartment homes in one building which have the same common front door. And then three such buildings are joined to form the same building number. For each building there is a fire alarm as soon as one enters the common front door and also in front of each individual apartment homes.
I did not want the boys to trip over the cartons and asked them to go up and wait for me to finish bringing the cartons up the stairs. S was very obedient and went up to the house immediately. On the other hand, A was hanging around on the stairs. Very opposite to his usual self, he was climbing the stairs very slowly. I went all the way up and was ready to dump the cartons in or house when I suddenly heard a LOUD LOUD LOUD sound - THE FIRE ALARM went off. Thinking that there was a real fire somewhere in one of the three buildings, I asked my in-laws and S to go out of the building. We were about to get down the stairs when I saw A at the bottom of the stairs - he was standing by the fire alarm examining it, naughtily laughing away, twitching his eyes as he was laughing and sneaking few peeks at my shocked face. it was then that I realized that there was NO REAL FIRE, A set off the fire alarm.
Unable to withstand the screeching deafening noise and ignorant of what is really happening, everyone (about more than 70 people) came out of their humble homes and were waiting on the road for the fire department to arrive. One of my friends who lives in the same building stopped by and about 5 of us tried to fix it to stop the noise. We followed all the instructions on the fire alarm, but nothing helped. Finally I called the apartment emergency service and got the fire alarm sound fixed. I got all weird questions from the emergency service, "Do you see smoke coming form anywhere in the building?" "Do you see orange flames anywhere?" etc etc...When i answered everything in the negative, they thought it must just be an accident that the fire alarm went off. It took them a while to come. But till they came we all took refuge in other friends' houses.
When I told my friend that it was A who did it she was shocked , but not much because we all know what kind of a little naughty fellow our dearie A is...
The next day we all got a notice from the apartment office to stay away form the fire alarms and not repeat any accidental setting off of the alarm.
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