Mr Handy

A broken leg, the flood, the vomits progressively going through the kids and back to school have all synced together to give us an exhausting week.  But I could have handled that. What has undone us is our littlest miss. She had her first birthday on Tuesday (oh yes, add that to the mix as well) and has decided sleeping at night is now optional. Again, this wouldn’t have been so bad except her cot is in our room.

Well, not anymore.

My priority, when I arrived home from work today, was to move that cot out of our room. Or our bed. One of them had to go.

“You want a hand?” Tracey asked.

I grabbed a couple of screwdrivers and headed into our bedroom.

“No. I’ve got this,” I told her, cheerfully ignoring 45 years of personal history.

Twenty seconds later I was back in the kitchen to again ferret through the shit drawer. “Allen key,” I told her when she threw me a questioning look.

But when I stood in front of the cot again, it occurred to me I could possibly just drag the whole thing through the house instead of pulling it apart. A nagging sort of voice started yapping away in my head, going on about being fairly sure I wasn’t able to get the cot into the bedroom in one piece so I probably wouldn’t be able to take it out in one piece, but my enthusiasm for getting the job finished so I could have an end of week beer managed to drown the voice out. Right up until the laws of physics proved the yapping voice right.

As I began using the Allen Key a new thought occurred to me: maybe I didn’t need to fully deconstruct the cot. Surely just a few screws would do. Probably just loosening them. Ten minutes and a lot of grunting later I was through our bedroom door.

“Nearly done,” I told Tracey as I dragged the floppy cot through the kitchen towards its new home.

“I can’t watch,” said Tracey. “Did you leave any paint on the door?”

This is where what I’ll call the smooth part of the job ended. You see, it turns out the doors to the kids bedrooms are slightly tighter. I discovered this when, after much grunting and cussing, I got the whole thing caught firmly in the doorjamb.

Sadly, I was pulling the cot rather than pushing it, so I ended up on a different side of the door to the Allen Key.

“Psst,” I hissed at the kids. “Pssst!”

I finally attracted Master7’s attention by tossing a soft toy at him.

“What’s wrong dad?” he asked me loudly.

“Nothing,” I whispered. “Do me a favour mate and duck into mum and dad’s room and grab me the Allen Key off the floor.”

“What’s an Allen Key?” he asked loudly.

“It’s just a black, metal thing. It’s shaped like an L.”

“For Loser,” said Tracey from the kitchen.

Eventually I did manage to remove the screws holding the cot rigid in the door frame, but not until I had to crawl unceremoniously under the mess to get at all the socket heads. When it was finally back together and structurally sound I rewarded myself with a beer and stood proudly looking at it.

“Told you I’d do it,” I told Tracey. “Henceforth you may call me Mr Handy.”

“Capped,” agreed Tracey.

The way she was laughing at her little joke I suspect that name may stick.

photo (10)

 

Blurry photo of kids demonstrating their commando crawls. Tracey suggested they

shouldn’t have done this without hard hats but that thing wasn’t moving anywhere.

 

photo (11)

“No comment” Tracey catches me in a Sixty Minutes pose. Blurred effect just adds to the realism.

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‘raising a family on little more than laughs’

 

4 Comments

  • I have to share: We recently put our middle child into a toddler bed so that our youngest could move out of the bassinette into the cot. I looked at the cot and thought “I’m sure that will fit through the door!” I then thought of this story and chuckled to myself but still had to try…long story short is that it did fit out of Jesse’s room but got stuck in Ashleigh’s doorway…however I learnt from you and had the Allen keys in my pocket and only needed to remove two screws to get it unstuck!

    Love your blog, it’s hilarious and so nice to read the utter honesty of your stories!

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