So I have a bunch of home automation projects I’ve been tinkering with weather related. One of which is an air quality sensor that determines when the air quality is bad with the intention of displaying some visual notifications around the house. I’ve been working on the coding for it and currently have it sitting on my desk in my home office. My most recent addition to it was having it graphing the data out to a webpage on my home network so I could see the change over time. The day I finished it and started testing was the day before Thanksgiving, my niece, 14 years old, decided she wanted to spend the night to hang out with her cousin, my son, since her mom and dad were coming over for Thanksgiving the next day anyways.
My home office is also our guest room, so the bed she sleeps in is in there. She went to bed about 10, I went downstairs to play some video games and have a couple of beers. I finally went to bed about 1 am, when I walked passed her room, I could hear her talking on the phone.
Next morning comes and after everyone is up and moving I decided to check on my air quality sensor and see how the data looked on the graph. As soon as I pulled up, something was really suspicious. It was basically a flat line with values between 1 and 5 most of the time, but at 1:05 am and 1:15 am it spiked twice to ~150. I took me a few seconds to put 1 and 1 together… “the only time I’ve ever seen it get that high was when food was cooking and there was smoke coming off the stove”… ohhhhhhhhhh.
I called her into the room and showed her the paper and told her, “The only reason these numbers would show like this is there was some kind of smoke in the room”. She said, “I don’t smoke”. I said, “Or something like a vape pen.” Her face went white, “Are you going to tell my mom?” “No, but you need to give me the vape pen”. So now I have a vape pen.
I can see both sides on telling her parents, but if you’re not going to tell them, I would definitely pull her aside in the future and follow up on it. If you think she is continuing to vape, I woulh definitely tell them.
There is a lot going on with her, she’s fragile. It was Thanksgiving, I didn’t want to put her mom in that state of mind. I talked to my wife about it and we both came to the conclusion that she’s probably going to be making some more bad decisions and when she does, we want her to know she can trust us. We did have a conversation with her, much more than what I posted. I don’t think we are going to change anything, but I hope it’s been driven in that we love her and are here for her.
Damn you’re doin it right. She’s lucky to have you guys.
You are an amazing Uncle and Aunt.
Kids always end up outing themselves. Either the parents will figure it out, or they mess up and leave one in a pocket for the laundry.
No this is wrong. Smart and reasonable people are not allowed to use reddit. Jokes aside, you guys are amazing. I have a niece and she’s 5, i hope she stays the way she is.
Unfortunately disposables are cheap and pretty easy to get. And strong, like stronger than a cigarette. But I agree that it’s better to be the trusted adult than the “tattle tale” adult. (Tattle tale from the perspective of the kid. You’d be well within your rights to tell the parents).
I have 9 nieces and nephews. And the ones who are old enough know that they can come to me with something that’s embarrassing over their parents and I’ll actually help and keep my mouth shut. I am the “cool” uncle, but I don’t care about that. I’m just trying to be the adult that I never had growing up.
Heaven help me when they’re old enough to get into “real” trouble! I’ll be there for them, but I’m positive I’m gonna hear some shit, lol