When my husband and I first moved in together we lived in a condo downtown.  One Friday night, in the middle of winter the building’s fire alarm went off in the middle of the night.

I rolled over, put a pillow over my head and went back to sleep.

My husband was up, dressed and pulling me out of bed before I even got to first base with Brad Pitt.  Slightly irritated to be woken from what had the potential to be a very steamy dream, I told him to go back to bed, that it was probably someone pulling a prank.

I didn’t believe him until he practically threw me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and stuck my face to the window.  That’s when I saw a firefighter being lifted up to our building in a bucket, about to climb onto the balcony of the unit beside ours.  That sure put a spring in my step!

So several years later, when we were vacationing in Italy with our infant daughter, you’d think I’d believe him when he jolts out of bed at 4am, yelling “EARTHQUAKE!”

“It’s just the wind.” I tell him without even opening my eyes.

But his Papa-Bear instincts have kicked in and he’s heading for our baby and then the door frame, all the while trying to talk some sense into me.

Like a teenager being woken too early on a Saturday morning, I grudgingly open my eyes, wondering why I’m suddenly on an 80’s style water-bed.

That’s the exact moment I realized I definitely was not on a water bed.  It was the earth below me rocking.  We were right beside the epicenter of a full blown 6.0 earthquake.

Looks like I may have under-reacted.  Again.

When we woke up the next morning, we were surrounded by rubble.  We were just outside Parma, where my dearly beloved Parmigiano Reggiano reigns from.  Millions of dollars worth of cheese was lost in the quake, and cheese lovers around the world would be effected in the grocery aisles for years to come.

So next time you say, “Pass the Parm” you can think of my family:  Husband ready to save the life of our first born child, while I lay dreaming of sailing the 7 Seas, as the bed shakes violently below me, one random night in Northern Italy.