Fire Stations

Our small town has an all-volunteer fire department, and every year around this time they have a "community appreciation" day: so this morning we made plans to head two blocks over and have the children enjoy the fire engines etc.
Our plans were brought forward by a few minutes when we heard the sound of a helicopter overhead, so we rushed out the door and were just in time to see it circle overhead a few times before landing in the field opposite the fire station.
It is always one of the highlights of these special days: they bring in a med-evac chopper, and let the children sit inside it (although not in the pilot's seat: apparently the last time they went to display the helicopter and let kids in the pilot's seat, it took ten minutes to flip all the switches back to the appropriate positions: and if those ten minutes are at the front end of an emergency call, that's a real problem!)
The other big hits were a mobile command centre, complete with a camera 40 feet in the air, so you could sit inside and watch everything around you, a very tall ladder truck, and most thrilling of all for the children, they had a hose set up so that they could squirt water at traffic cones and knock them down. The kids must have stood in line twenty times to do that, over and over again!

As a result, Boo and Skibo have been walking around all day saying "When I grow up, I'm going to be a firefighter"!

Yours, appreciating the day,
N.