Project Time!

Oscar bought me a bicycle for Christmas. It's a beautiful bicycle, and I love it, but I've only been able to ride it once since I got it. I didn't get a child seat to go along with my bike and having a Turtle glued to my hip the majority of each day makes it rather difficult to get my pedal on. So a couple of weeks ago, Oscar and I got the child seat. And it was good. So naturally, it sat in the garage, waiting for us to find the time to navigate the instructions and attach it to my beautiful bicycle.

Oscar and I generally work very well together when assembling projects of this sort. Oscar thoroughly reads all instructions and gets all of his tools together and lays out the pieces. I huff in the general direction of the instructions and pass him tools and hand Oscar the piece he needs. No, that one...no, THAT one....no, THAT ONE . It's a system that works well for us. For this project, however, we seemed off. For some reason, Oscar asked me to read the instructions, and when I threw up my hands at the utter futility of it all because not one person who writes assembly instructions can manage to write them in English, Oscar took over the show and left me to sit on the sidelines and cheer him on.

As one can imagine, this did not go well. It especially did not go well because as Oscar was trying to assemble this beast of a child's seat, Turtle was running to and fro and hijacking Oscar's parts. The little L-shaped brackets became his "go-gos" and he was shooting everything with them. When he got sick of that, they became shovels and he dug around in the dirt with them. When that got old, he absconded with Oscars wrenches and used them as hammers. Why he didn't just grab Oscar's hammer, I will never know, but I will not be the one to stifle our child's creativity and imagination.

When Turtle started feeding rocks to our trees, I figured it was naptime, so I took him inside while Oscar continued to plow through the assembly process. When I came back out, Oscar was struggling to get a bolt on one of the screws. He kept dropping it, and it would roll off into parts unknown, and Oscar would have to go track it down and start all over. By the fourth or fifth time he dropped the bolt, I was snickering. Well, wouldn't you? Unfortunately, this was not the time for snickering. Oscar was having none of it. He was at war with this bolt and, in fact, with this whole process. This whole convoluted process in which nothing fits the way it should and everything has to be jerry-rigged and why can't they just build something that works the way it's supposed to the first time and WHY ARE MY INSTRUCTIONS WRITTEN IN CUNEIFORM, BY GOD??????

I was starting to worry about whether Oscar was going to make it out of this process alive and well. Although, I should have known better when he looked over at me and said, "You can't wait to get inside to blog about this, can you?" Well, clearly!

In the end, Oscar was not only alive and well, but Turtle's seat was safely mounted to my bike. We took him for a spin in the afternoon and he loved it. This bodes well for my new resolution to keep Turtle away from the television more during the day. A resolution which I am sure will work out as well as my last resolution to get my ass off the couch more. In short, not at all. But a girl can dream.