There was a news story recently about a woman in California who rescued her 5 year old by fighting a mountain lion with her bare hands.
It reminded me of another time that a parent had to rise to an unbelievable occasion: today in 2019, a woman in Sweden ran into a burning house to save all six of her children.
Emma Schols was rousing the household around six in the morning – by herself, since her husband worked the night shift.
She’d sent her four and three year olds downstairs to play, but they soon called upstairs that there was a fire.
Schols raced down, got them out of the house, and then went back in, locking the door behind her, so the little ones didn’t try to re-enter.
But there were four more kids in the house, and the fire was getting worse by the second.
Schols said to herself, I brought these children into the world, it’s up to me to make sure they make it out of the house alive.
One of the older children jumped down from a balcony to get someone to call for a fire truck.
Schols and two more kids helped get a ladder down from the balcony so they could escape too.
Then, she had to go back in and rescue the youngest, a two year old, crawling through the house to avoid breathing smoke.
She handed the little one off to one of the older kids, then collapsed in the grass.
She’d been burned over 93 percent of her body. Recovery took months.
But all six of her kids got out of the fire without serious injury.
As one relative said of Schols, “she has always been the one who helped everyone.”
Sounds about right.
Now let’s talk about something very chill and calm cause I think we could use that.
Saturday is National Hummingbird Day.
A team at Princeton did some research a while back that showed that hummingbirds can see a huge range of colors, including “non-spectral,” ultraviolet colors that human eyes can’t spot.
Emma, 30: I saved my six children from the flames (Expressen.se)
Hummingbirds Can See Colors We Can’t Even Imagine (Wired)
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