Dear Jessica Brennan,
On this, the long weekend where Canadians from coast to coast take time to stop and honour our love for Queen Victoria and her birthday I thought we should remember, “Safety First”! Â Of course we all know not to drink and drive and to wear sunscreen, should any sun appear. Swim with a buddy! This is all good advice. However, because alas, the Queen tends to order up weather that keeps us indoors, I thought we could review some of the less commonly spoken of dangers in the home. Let’s start with a game to illustrate the lurking peril hiding in plain sight. Â Do you remember us playing these kinds of puzzle games when you were little?
OK, well I have made my own matching game for you to play over the weekend. It’s a safety game. The idea is to match the two items that should never be used together. These all come from real life experiences I have had, so the intel is first-hand. Go ahead and see how you do.
Have you discovered the matching dangers?  Let me help you with the explanation once you have absorbed this completed puzzle.
Let’s begin with our first match – the bed and the ceiling fan. A bed of course is a relatively safe thing, and once you have a ceiling fan installed by a professional, it too is not something that generally causes any real danger. Â But together they can be problematic, particularly if the ceiling fan is installed above the bed and you, like me, like to stand on the bed when you are poofing the top sheet onto the bottom one when you’re changing the bedding. That fan can pack a punch if it whacks you just behind the ear, and because you didn’t stand up into the blades on purpose, your mind immediately thinks you’ve been the victim of a sneak attack by some unknown bedroom dweller who carries a cricket bat. Â It also (from the inside anyway) sounds like your head is hollow when it hits you, knocking you on your back, confused, with your legs and arms all tied up in a sheet. I propose that warnings be added to both the bed and the ceiling fan in order to protect the welfare of the public. Something like: If installing fan above bed, turn fan off on wash day.
Next we have the obvious hair dryer and room freshener. One must be careful with both which are similar in that they blow things out into the room. Â The hair dryer is hot and the room freshener can make it difficult to breathe, but none of this is the real threat to your safety. Putting them together though creates the perfect storm (obviously). Allow me to explain. The true danger comes when you are sleep deprived and you squirt the flammable room freshener on your hair thinking it’s leave-in conditioner, and then put the blow dryer to it. Wow it can really wake you up when your hair is instantly ignited and the smoke fills the room causing the smoke detectors to scream. A coughing, burning, noisy situation with zero visibility. The warning here: when using these products together, always do so with a fire extinguisher pointed at your head.
Well I’m laughing now, because the next match is likely the first one that everyone went for. The shower and the security system. You can’t miss that. For those who may have looked too deeply though and missed the obvious, I will explain. When you’re in the shower and your husband opens the front door to go to Tim Hortons in the morning and forgets that the security system is on and keeps walking despite the fact that a horn loud enough to indicate an air raid for all of Middlesex County starts blaring throughout the neighbourhood, because all he’s focused on is an extra-large regular, and you now know that you have just 30 seconds to get downstairs to the keypad and get the alarm turned off before the police come, there are a lot of hazards. As you fly like lightning through the shower curtain, first comes the tile floor, then the hardwood, then the polished wood stairs, and finally the psychological damage from the knowledge that you’re standing bruised and naked at the back door keying in the security code, and the backdoor happens to be a french door. There are so many warnings to put on these products: Always shower fully dressed with rubber soled shoes on  though, appears to be the best advice for the thrill seekers who insist on keeping these two products in their home.
I think I will keep the step-stool danger-matches until the end. Â The step-stool represents so many significant yet hidden dangers that it merits its own section.
But, how many of us have had this happen, I know I have – The mouth and the fake fingernail combination. Â I think I can begin with the warning here. Don’t scratch your mouth while applying glue to your fake nails, or you will have a fake nail crazy-glued to your lip instantly, and when you pull it off, it will make any frozen pole with your tongue stuck to it in kindergarten seem like a trip to Storybook Gardens!
Plants are dangerous, of course. Don’t eat them and don’t let your pets eat them. Â I personally do not eat plants unless they are sold in the produce department of the market because I admit that I don’t know much about them. Â Like much of the advice I am sharing Dear Jessica, I learned this the hard way, in this case from doing my very own Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman routine while walking in Thames Park. Here is the warning to the reader: Do not take the leaf of a plant (in this case one that secreted thick white fluid when you broke it in half) and apply it to a broken, weeping blister on your foot, securing it with tied lengths of grass as a make-shift bandage, to be a buffer between your foot and your shoe until you get home unless you like the idea of having to wear a shoe two sizes larger than your normal size on one foot for a month. You may think you can survive on a desert island. You cannot. You will die.
So what comes next? Ah yes, the dress and the door knob.  I should be specific here. All dresses do not present a problem, nor do all door knobs. The drapey dress with deep pockets does pose a risk though. It is very easy to have the earth meet your face with staggering velocity when you are racing by a door knob at full speed and your pocket gets caught with the door knob deep in it, and stops you in your tracks with your head surging forward like a German Shorthaired Pointer and your feet still running to their destination. It happens fast. It hits you hard. Your nose may break unless you’re short of stature in which case you may need to scream for help because you will be hanging there upside down on the side of the door for awhile.  Lesson learned.
As promised, this just leaves the step-stool dangers. I have learned many things to do with step-stools over the years. Don’t climb one in stilettos. Â Make sure you place it on a solid surface before climbing. This is all commonsense. What they do not tell you is this. Â When climbing the step-stool wearing a new nightie made of rather stiff fabric – say flannelette for instance, and you reach for the roasting pan on the top shelf of a kitchen with ten foot ceilings, be careful that the front of said nightie does not slip over the U-back of the stool as you descend the steps, because quickly you will reach the point of no return where you can neither step up or down and you are stuck with but one choice – which is to, as if in slow-motion, tip until you fall over backward with the stool wedged between your tummy and the binding fabric, leaving you on the floor with legs and arms squirming like an upside down June-bug. True story.
I hope these tips will help you enjoy the long weekend and give you time to properly reflect on Queen Victoria’s contribution to our lives. Personally, I love a good Victoria Sponge. That’s it for these common reminders to get your weekend off to a safe start. I think the over-arching lesson for the Two-Four Weekend is, fireworks are fine, but avoid door knobs.
Love Mum xo
PS – I remembered the step-stool nightie lesson last night as I successfully navigated my way down the steps. Unfortunately I landed my right foot into the empty plastic laundry basket which took off like a luge across the freshly washed kitchen floor with me in it. I felt like Clark Griswold after he coated his snow saucer with the super slick wax in Christmas Vacation, only he was seated, and I was racing on one foot. Man our cats can really run.
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