Fire Alarm

We were at the farewell party for the Beans in August.

It was towards the end of the night and we were catching up with some people we hadn't seen in a while when I suddenly heard the fire alarm go off.

Within seconds, I said "that was Isaac".  I just had this gut feeling and knew it had to be him.  And sure enough, I was right.  As everyone began filtering out of the building, I ran to the hallway to find an hysterical 4 year old boy.  He was clearly scared, and knew he had done something, but didn't know how to fix it.  As he was trying to push the lever back up, he was screaming bloody murder, but quickly transferred his fright to me, yelling "why did you DO that?"  amongst other screams that I can't remember anymore.

  I scooped him up and carried him outside while he was still screaming his head off.  When we got outside, I mentioned to a couple of people that it was Isaac's fault, but he was not happy about that, and started to deny it.  I realized he must have been embarrassed, so I waited until we got to the van to say any more about it.

In the van on the way home, we tried to talk more about it and asked how he felt when he pulled it- if he was scared or whatever, but he refused and kept saying no, and it was clear he didn't want to talk about it.

The next day I brought it up again and asked how he felt when he pulled the alarm, and he finally admitted that he didn't know it was going to do that and he was embarrassed and didn't want everyone to know he had done it.  At least he was finally able to talk about this traumatic event!  I've noticed with Isaac lately that he is not trying to be bad or mischievous, but often times is in his own world with such a wild imagination that things just happen.  He does feel really bad when he does something wrong and would rather just cover it up so nobody knows, but at least he seems to care more than he used to about following rules.