"Handy"man

The next time Santa has a present for Connor that needs assembling, I’m hoping he has it express delivered about a week in advance. I don’t think putting things together the night before plays to my skill set.
A while back Connor, our 2-year-old, started climbing out of his crib so we transitioned it to a bed. With the rails gone he started his Houdini routine and escaped quite quickly from it after just an hour or two each night. He does enjoy the big bed in our extra room, however, and since this has gone on for a while we took drastic measures.
That’s right, we took advantage of his love all things trucks and purchased a fire engine toddler bed in the hope of coaxing him into sleeping in it in his own room.
The only problem – I am not much of an assembler.

The company we got the bed from gave a little bit of help. It showed all the parts I was supposed to have, a finished black and white diagram and a decent set of visual instructions. That’s OK except I guess it’s in my DNA that I do better with written directions accompanying the visual. I tend to lose patience quickly and had an opportunity to work on frustration verbalization. Luckily our dog Bo was the only one around to have his ears seared.
The project essentially took three days. On the company’s website they had testimonies from those who loved the product and thought it was a cinch, constructing it in a mere 45 minutes. I want to punch them in the throat.
I first had to join two pieces of wood together with a middle piece using a peg and a screw. No problem, except the wood split. There has been some debate in our household about whether I destroyed it or if it was more than just a bit defective. I think I got a bad rap but I suppose with my well-earned reputation for bruting things I guess I had it coming. I went ahead and put some other parts together but we had to wait for replacement parts to come in, delaying the project for a week or so.
Non-defective parts arrived and were quickly put together. I just had a few more things to go but when you put a part in the wrong place and don’t discover it until the next part won’t work, it takes a little time to backtrack.

Finally got the bed assembled and waited to see what Connor’s reaction would be. After all, when Melanie tried to help me with a certain part he was more than happy to get in the mix as well. He saw the finished bed and still declared he wanted to sleep in “the big room”
Ouch.