A public service announcement. Really.

At 5:00 a.m. on Friday morning I woke up to Eric shouting for me to get the girls and go outside because the carbon monoxide alarm was going off. I plucked two very-asleep girls out of their beds, carried them downstairs, put on their coats and Uggs and put them in my car.

Eric called 911.

By the time I pulled my car out of the driveway two police cars had arrived. Then a fire engine and the fire chief's car and then another police car. They blocked off the street in a very dramatic made-for-TV moment.

I kept thinking there simply must just not be much going on in our town at 5:00 in the morning.

The firefighters went in our house and measured the carbon monoxide levels. I was meanwhile mentally chastising myself for leaving dishes in the sink and wrapping paper and ribbon all over the family room floor. Another fire engine arrived. The firefighters finally came out and told us the carbon monoxide levels in the house were really high, high enough that they had called an ambulance to come and evaluate the four of us. They thankfully didn't mention the dishes or the wrapping paper.

Kenna and Michal sang "Deck the Halls" to the paramedics as they listened to their hearts. Kenna kept asking one of the paramedics to sing with her. I just sat there feeling dizzy and wondering if it was the carbon monoxide or an aversion to being up at 5:00 a.m.

We thankfully didn't need to go to the hospital to spend time in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber which, in case you've ever wondered, is the treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning.

The girls and I spent the day, without heat and with the windows open, waiting for the repairman to arrive. He came, three hours late, diagnosed the problem and left after telling us he was positive he knew what was wrong and would be back to fix it.

Exactly 30 minutes later the carbon monoxide alarms went off again.

We didn't call 911 this time. Instead, we opened all the windows and went out to dinner.

Repairman number two arrived shortly after we got home from dinner. He couldn't definitively find the problem but at least he didn't guess.

We slept with the heat off and the windows open. It snowed all night.

Repairman number three arrived in the morning. He showed promise when he started talking about things like "balancing air pressure" and "draft." Then he pulled out a highly-sophisticated carbon monoxide-measuring thing -- that's a technical term -- and found the problem in just minutes.

12 hours later we were the proud owners of a brand new boiler.

When the fire department was ready to leave our house the morning the whole thing began, the fire chief looked at Eric and said, "If you didn't have a carbon monoxide detector the outcome this morning could have been much, much different."

So all this to say, make sure you have a carbon monoxide detector on every floor of your house and make sure they all are working. Stand up right now and go check the batteries. Truly, do it right now. I always thought a carbon monoxide detector was kind of silly.

I don't think that any more.