Emergency Planning with Love

Last night, there was a tornado warning for part of New England [sic] , which of course Amy took seriously. I picked up the young'uns at her office so that she could meet with a client, and the idea was that I would take them home, but she had already drilled Ian in a contingency plan, which he dutifully repeated to me, outlining the prospect of us all going to Aunt Ali's house if the tornado should strike the Interstate on our way back. [Probably Amy had planned to share that program with me directly, but also instructed Ian with the same details as a kind of back-up...]

Ian took the whole thing very seriously, and started thinking about other places we might go the next time there's a tornado warning, and he had three pairs of aunts-and-uncles in mind: next time, we could go to Aunt Ali's, to Auntie Ann's in Connecticut, or to Uncle Dana's house. Uncle Dana lives in Seattle, so the idea is that we might drive roughly 3,000 miles to safety from a tornado.

However, most touching was his request, before we left Mommy's office:

"Daddy, if we need to go to Aunt Ali's house, can we stop at the house [our house], pick up Rhett, then go?"

In other words, he was asking that we drive the extra fifteen minutes that Mommy's emergency plan was designed to spare us, for the rescue and/or companionship of a gerbil, and then drive another 15 minutes to Aunt Ali's house, to take shelter from the tornado.

No boy has ever loved a gerbil more.

(May 30, 2011)