Asphyxiation by fireplace

I'm not sure that I have ever thought about lighting a fire on a windy day. Today it was very windy. I have no means of properly measuring how strong the gusts were. I can imagine that throughout the day most of the gusts probably measured well above 40 mph. It was windy, cold and we weren't planning on going anywhere, the perfect ingredients for a nice fire; at least I thought. Well, it was so windy that the wind gusts were blowing the smoke right back down the chimney, into the living room and up the stairs. I opened a door for air and it just made things worse. The kids were whining about the smoke so I made them sit in a bedroom upstairs with Yia Yia (grandma) until we could clear the smoke. It was troublesome because I couldn't help but worry about the kids' safety. I also put Gigi in the bathroom.

In the beginning, we thought that the smoke was just the normal smoke that you get if you use a newspaper to light the fire like we did. After a few minutes we realised that we were wrong. Each time we thought that things were looking better, whoosh-another gust blew smoke down the chimney. Kosta finally decided to close the big metal doors in the fireplace and eventually the smoke cleared out. It took about an hour or so. So, we had our fire and it was warm but I'll think twice about lighting up on a windy day such as this one.