How dummies made me scared of fire

My sister Olivia was born when I was two years old. I was not used to other kids around, but my parents handled it well. They bought me a baby doll of real baby size, so both me and my mom had babies to take care of! I just copied whatever she did with the baby, and at two years old, I was a proud mother. The only downside is that we wasted a lot of nappies! I turned out to be really protective of my sister. I wouldn't let anyone go near her, because the baby was sleeping. She was always sleeping!

Olivia turned out to be the exact opposite of me. I was very loud, and Olivia was such a quiet baby. My parents couldn't believe that life could be so easy with a baby. My mom jokes that I scared her with my noise and this is how she came to be so quiet. Olivia loved dummies, also known as pacifiers. She had at least a dozen dummies lying here and there in the house. Most of them were pink. The only time she was actually naggy was when she wanted a dummy to chew on. "I want my dummyyy!!!"

Personally I had never liked the damn thing and had never used dummies as a baby. I'd always spit them out because they made me want to throw up! But I liked Olivia’s transparent dummy, because it was transparent. Transparent was my new favorite color. A few months later, she got a glow-in-the-dark dummy, and glow-in-the-dark was my even newer favorite color.

My parents used to sterilize Olivia's dummies by boiling them in hot water. They just threw a bunch of them in a small coffee pot and let them boil for a few minutes. One day, an uncle came to visit and my parents forgot the dummies in the boiling water. At some point I came into the kitchen and saw smoke rising high to the ceiling! I called my parents who run to the kitchen, turned out the fire and threw the dummies in the trash! The transparent dummy was one of the victims.

From that moment onward, I was always afraid that my parents would forget the fire on. Every night before I went to bed, I dropped by the kitchen and thoroughly checked the stove for any forgotten fires. I was too young to realize that an open gas without a fire is even more dangerous, so I didn't worry about that. Thankfully, my parents never forgot the fire on again!