Ten on Tuesday - The Help, Help, Fire! Edition

This week's Ten on Tuesday topic is 10 Things You Would Save If Your House Was On Fire. Thankfully we can assume our families are safe and just focus on the stuff.

1.  Family photos - I have almost 30 albums of these, and while I don't look at them often, they are irreplaceable and I would be heartbroken if they were gone.
2.  Important papers - Like the deed to the house (that is burning down!), birth certificates, etc.
3.  Knitting - This is the knitting bag by my chair, (overly) stuffed full of current knitting and some special yarn for queued projects. I'll need something to do while waiting for the fire trucks.

4.  My sons' childhood blankets - These might sound silly, but they evoke so much of my childrens' childhoods for me that I would definitely grab them out of the drawers they are stored in. 
5.  My grandfather's chime thing - My grandfather was a shop teacher, builder, butcher, and practically creative person. He had a friend who was dismantling a pipe organ, so he took one of the chimes from it and built a base and hammer for it. It sat on his desk throughout my childhood, had a special spot in my mother's house, and it's now by my dining room door where I see it every day.

6.  My great-grandmother's cookie recipe - This graced my grandmother's kitchen for as long as I can remember. The cookies are delicious (even if I don't use lard!) and now it's in my kitchen.

7.  My husband's grandmother's china - My husband's grandmother had a really large set of Johnson Brother's Old Britain Castles china, and my mother-in-law was anxious to find a home for it when they cleaned out her mother's house. Everyone else in the family already had china, so I was the lucky recipient. I hadn't seen them before my mil brought them over, and was absolutely thrilled to be gifted something that I thought was both incredibly beautiful and useful!

8.  My brother-in-law's wedding gift - My bil painted this on a rescued wicker tray and gave it to us for a very meaningful wedding gift. We lost him to malignant melanoma years ago, so this irreplaceable and priceless gift is something I would definitely save.

9.  Jewelry - I'm not a big jewelry person, but I do have a few family pieces that I would grab in my frantic racing through the house.
10. Our new smoke detectors - This is on my list because my husband just attended a fire safety seminar at work and learned that the detectors themselves should be replaced every ten years. The lenses on photoelectric detectors get dusty over time and the radioactive element in the ionizing type can degrade over time. Several of ours are more than 20 years old, so we really are replacing all of them.

In reality, I don't think I would have time to save anything, and in the end, it's all just stuff. I truly hope that nobody has to experience rescuing people or things from a house on fire, but this is a valuable thing to think about.