Scary scary, very scary

First off, let me begin with a little good news: the demon that has possessed my sweet little boy's body for the past week seems to have departed. He's been really funny and lovey today, and didn't call me a name or try to hit me even once. I have a theory: this morning when we left the house, I asked him if he remembered to bring his listening ears (there was an "incident" at preschool yesterday where he didn't listen to his teachers & ended up not getting to swim with his class). He said yes, but that their pretend batteries were dead. I replaced the dead pretend batteries with new pretend batteries, and boom! There you have it. A listener.

And now the scary part: I was on my way to pick up the Bee after school when my cell phone rang. It was M. I had just turned onto the street where the preschool is & was about 3 blocks away. I pulled over to talk to M. As I was sitting there, I noticed in my rearview mirror that there were about 10 police cars with their lights on in the parking lot of an old Walgreen's right across the street from where I was. This quickly multiplied to about 15 cars, then a couple pulled into the parking lot right next to me. When I noticed the helicopter circling, I got the creeps big-time. I interrupted M to tell him there were cops everywhere, I didn't feel safe, and I needed to get to the Bee to get him out of there. Then I pretty much hung up on him.

When I got to the school, the front doors (normally locked & you need a combination to get in) were standing open. I went in & told the receptionist what was going on down the street & that she might want to close the doors. Within about 30 seconds, they had locked every door and window, shut all the blinds, moved all the kids into rooms on the side of the hall away from the street, and announced a lock-down. Kind of sad that they had to hear it from me before the police called, but oh well. We were locked in for about 45 minutes before the police said they could let people go, even though they discouraged it. I ran out, stuffed the Bee in the car, and took off in the opposite direction. I did NOT feel safe there.

Why didn't I feel safe? Well, apparently one of Colorado's most wanted fugitives had holed himself up in a house three blocks down the street. They didn't know if he had hostages, or what kinds of weapons he had. By the time we left, there were at least two police cars on every block for about a mile around the school. And keep in mind, we left in the opposite direction of where all this was going on. There were three helicopters circling.

Unfortunately, his school isn't in a very good neighborhood. We LOVE the school, but it's pretty much in the worst part of town. Something along these lines happens about once a year. Last year it was a drive-by shooting three blocks in the opposite direction of today's stand-off.

I hope that all this will become a moot point, as we're considering moving to another town about 40 miles from here sometime in the next year. More on that some other day. I have to get off the computer, or I'll miss the beginning of the Daily Show! I can't miss my main (OK, only) source of TV news!