#unfortunately (fortunately?) that shit is not news-worthy in boston

[livwritesstuff]

elaborating on a throwaway line in this in which I referenced robin telling one of steddie's daughters to pull a fire alarm

So Robin and Nancy have elected to remain childless. Among other reasons, they love their jobs, and their jobs involve a lot of travel (plus women can still have happy and fulfilling lives without pursuing motherhood, blah blah blah). 

Despite not wanting children of their own, they do still like kids and love being aunts to Steve and Eddie’s daughters. They make an effort to take them off their dads’ hands for a day at least once every month or so.

The first time Robin and Nancy take all three girls, Moe is 5, Robbie is 3, and Hazel is about 6 months old. At the time, Moe and Robbie are very into being fancy – tea parties, and dressing up as princesses, and Eddie’s been on a kick of reading to them old books about tragic children – think Secret Garden and A Little Princess – and Moe’s just old enough to start getting into American Girl Dolls and she’s obsessed with Samantha (“of course she likes the fanciest one the best,” Ed had grumbled about this, “She’s you to a goddamn T, Stevie.”), so they figured that taking the girls to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (where Robin works as a curatorial chair) would be a good idea, because they could get all dressed up and act like proper ladies.

Secretly, Steve thought they were crazy. He and Eddie are hesitant to even bring the girls to the children’s museum these days nevermind a prestigious fine arts museum, but he’s also aware that they tend to behave a hell of a lot better around other people than they do around their dads (also, he and Eddie haven’t had a kid-free day together since even before Hazel was born, so he keeps his mouth shut).

It all goes completely smoothly, actually, up until it takes a dramatic downward spiral. They do get very dressed up, and before they head over to the museum, they have brunch at a tea room where Robin flexes the history half of her art history education to tell the girls all about “fancy people” decorum. Then, about halfway through their tour of the museum, three-year-old Robbie points at the one non-art object installed in the wall – a bright red fire alarm – and asks, “What’s that say?”

Had Nancy been asked this question, she would have said something like, “That’s a fire alarm. We only touch fire alarms if there’s a fire. If there was a fire here, you would pull the handle and it would make a loud noise so everyone knows to get out of the building.”

Unfortunately for the entire museum that Saturday afternoon, Robbie doesn’t ask Nancy.

She asks Robin.

And Robin tells her, “It says ‘pull.’”

Nancy’s call to Steve goes something like this:

“Hi. Just want to let you know before you see it on the news that your daughter managed to evacuate the entire museum.”

“What?”

“Robin told her to do it.”

“Please elaborate before I have a heart attack.”