I think I need a Bat phone

I have a rule that I don't answer the phone while we are doing home school. Unless, of course, I check the caller ID and see that it's my husband or someone I need to talk to right away.

I get a lot of calls from people looking for a toy. Or needing a toy lady to do an event. Or they want to sell toys. And I do want to talk to all of those people. But I know their world won't collapse if I wait until early afternoon to call them. Otherwise, my kids will be constantly interrupted, and it will take us all day to finish school.

Well, Monday morning the phone kept ringing and ringing. It was starting to get a little bit humorous that it was ringing so often. I checked the caller ID each time. Telemarketer. Customer. Out of state number. Telemarketer.

Then my cell phone started ringing. Again, strange names and numbers I didn't recognize. "OK. I'll call them back after lunch" I thought.

I DO check my e-mail while we are doing home school because I often have little 5-minute windows when both boys are busy.

My husband sent me a message. "My phone doesn't work. Chris is going to call you."

That's weird. I wondered why my husband's phone didn't work. And why couldn't he just borrow his co-worker's phone? Why was Chris going to call me?

I e-mailed him back to say that the phone was ringing off the hook, but no calls from Chris.

He e-mailed me. "Just call Chris."

I don't usually have any reason to call my husband's co-worker, but just by chance, I had sent him an e-mail over the weekend about a kid's marathon that I thought his son might want to try. So, I thought, "Huh? He must have a question about that e-mail."

At this point, my cell phone was beeping every few minutes to tell me the battery was almost dead. Normally, I would have turned it off and plugged it in to recharge it. But we had to run out for a couple of minutes to get my daughter from preschool, so I decided to check my messages even though the battery warning was flashing red.

It was Chris. He said to call him right away. Now we were in the van on the way to preschool and I was afraid my battery would die before I could return the call.

He told me my husband was getting out of his car in the parking lot at work when he heard two loud pops in his back. He couldn't move and almost passed out. He couldn't even walk from the car to the building.

Chris took him to the Emergency Room and that's where he had been all morning. (It was now 11:30 a.m.)

I gathered up all three kids and headed to the hospital, which is about an hour north of us.
My husband is OK. He's in a ton of pain and can't move around very well.

I'm so thankful I checked my voice mail at 11 a.m. instead of waiting until the afternoon. I'm even more thankful I didn't assume the battery was already too dead to call the voice mail and just plug in the phone for a few hours.

I also tried to tell my husband that maybe he could have included an extra sentence in his e-mail to me. Something like: "I'm in the ER. Just call Chris." That would have got my attention.

And for future reference. I know it sounds odd, but in case of emergency, please e-mail me if I don't answer the phone.

I need some sort of top-secret spy phone or a special ring tone to tell me I need to pick up the phone right away. In the meantime, I need to come up with a better plan. I really have to be careful about answering too many phone calls in the middle of our school day. But I definitely wouldn't want something like that to happen again.

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