Some assembly required, Basic Training style

Quinn got a little parking garage for his birthday from nana and grampy. His eyes lit up when he pulled the paper off it (he's beginning to get the wrapping paper thing...) and he started positively vibrating in anticipation. We opened up the box and he started pulling parts out of the box. Unfortunately we had to take all the parts out of the box to get to the instructions, giving him ample opportunity to fling parts about in all directions.

It quickly became apparent that there was a delta between the picture on the front and the pile of parts on the floor. Some assembly required. Well actually seemingly a lot of assembly. With a vibrating, grunting son beside me and incomprehensible-in-8-languages instructions in hand, I set about assembly. Fortunately it was an engineer that designed it before the documentation people massacred it and I only put one thing together wrong requiring do-over. Every time I got another piece together Quinn would want to pick the whole thing up and shake it, thinking it was yet another hapless mommy- or daddy-constructed tower of cups or blocks to destroy.

Keep Quinn from destroying the partially constructed garage, keep Quinn out of the screws, keep Quinn away from the screwdriver, find the thrown parts, match part to cryptic instructions, keep Quinn from eating instructions, put part on, snap into place, hope it's the right place, install screws, realize part's in wrong place, remove screws, reinstall part, reinstall screws, fight with plastic parts that don't quite mate perfectly. In the end, with help from mommy, it went together pretty quickly and easily, and he absolutely loves it. He played with it for 20 minutes right away.

I remember thinking this about diaper changing. In pre-natal class they show you the diapers, how they work, how to put them on to a placid little doll. It was certainly valuable instruction, but it's a whole other thing again to put that same diaper on a wiggly baby madly trying to throw itself off the change table to its death while peeing in all directions and screaming at the top of its lungs. Similarly, "Some Assembly Required With Vibrating Child" is a whole lot more complicated than "Normal Some Assembly Required". I keep thinking of those military basic training clips you see in the movies, where raw recruits commando-crawl under the barbed wire with live fire going over their heads.

Having emerged from the parental barbed wire, we set off into the parental tire obstacles, with parental overhead-hand-over-hand and who knows what after that.