Alarmed

This is a picture of my newly installed alarm. Unfortunately, it took a violation of our home to initiate this new addition.

On Sunday at around 3:30 in the morning, Cookie started barking her little cockapoo head off. She is not a very bark-y dog but occasionally the random noise or cat in the backyard will get her going. We woke up but she stopped so we went back to sleep. When I woke up in the morning and went downstairs, I noticed that the TV cabinet door was open but I didn't really think anything of it. Then I went into the garage and the side door was wide open. I thought that was weird but we had had a BBQ on Saturday and were in and out of the garage through that door so I thought maybe it accidentally didn't get closed all the way and the wind blew it open. We went about our morning and around 10am we went in the backyard to clean up from the BBQ and noticed that one of the ladders from our ladderball game was missing. I was positive it had been there the night before when I cleaned up a little and we couldn't figure out where it had gone. We started looking around and Bryan could see through the slats in our fence that the ladder was laying in the field behind our house. When he looked over the fence he saw that not only was the ladder back there, but some of the decorations from our fence and one of the tiki torches were back there too. It became obvious that someone had been in our backyard and suddenly my brain put all the little weird things together and I had the sickening realization that SOMEONE HAD BEEN IN OUR HOUSE!! I ran inside and checked the TV cabinet more carefully and sure enough, our Wii was gone! Then I realized that when I had been in the kitchen I hadn't seen my purse. I checked again and that along with Bryan's wallet were also gone. At that point I completely lost it. The thought of someone being INSIDE our house while we were sleeping and with Hailey down the hall made me absolutely sick to my stomach. The rest of Father's Day was spent dealing with the police, figuring out what else was missing (Bryan's racing bike and snowboards), making an appointment with the DMV, and cancelling our credit cards. We also made an appointment to get an alarm installed ASAP. Since then my mind has been racing with "coulda, woulda, shoulda's"... I should have double checked all the door locks before going to bed, we should have been more diligent about locking the door from the garage, we should have already had an alarm, what if Cookie hadn't barked and scared them away, what if they had wanted to hurt us, what if they had gotten to Hailey, etc. etc. I've realized that if I keep thinking like that I'm going to drive myself insane and the bottom line is, it happened and I can't do anything to go back in time and change it. All I can do is go forward and do everything I can to make sure my family is safe. And the number one thing on my list is setting my brand new alarm.