Sydney mum Mel needed her hard-earned rest last Saturday morning. She was very tired and coming down with a cold.
So, when five-year-old Isobel came bounding in to wake her at 6.30am, Mel told her she wasn’t feeling well and needed to rest.
Isobel left her to it and Mel assumed she had gone to play in the living room. However, she could hear her little girl’s voice through the door.
“I heard her talking to herself in the living room, but she often does that while she’s playing. Then she came into the bedroom holding my mobile and told me that she had called ‘three zero’."
"I quickly grabbed the phone off her panicking and it looked like it was still calling through so I hung up,” an embarrassed Mel told the Kidspot podcast The Juggling Act.
Mel had taught Isobel how to call for help in case of an emergency but hadn’t reckoned the precocious little girl trying it out.
“I had no idea what to do! I asked her if she had talked to someone and she said ‘yes, she told them that mummy wasn’t well’. I froze, listening for sirens, no idea what to do next.”
Mel soon had a call back from an emergency operator who told her: “We just had a call from a little girl who said, ‘Mummy wouldn’t get out of bed.’ “
A flustered Mel explained the situation to the operator. “I’ve been teaching her how to call for help in an emergency but we need to work on distinguishing when Mummy is tired and Mummy actually genuinely needing some help!”
Mel had to reassure the concerned operator that everyone was ok and that it had been a misunderstanding on the caring little girl’s part.
“She was very understanding but did keep asking whether everyone in the house was okay. I reassured her that we were all fine and that I was just a bit tired. She finally hung up, convinced that it was an innocent mistake.”
After her initial panic, Mel felt proud of Isobel for listening to her lesson how to call for help in an emergency and realised her daughter acted very maturely for her age.
“I obviously didn’t want to reprimand her as she had done the right thing, but we had a big chat about how she only needed to call for help if Mummy couldn’t talk to her,” she said.
“I was so mortified but also proud that my lessons had sunk in!”
Poor Mel – she won’t be having a lie-in again anytime soon!
