Paul and the Family

For a long time Adam’s been fascinated with tools — screwdrivers are his favorite, but wrenches and hammers are up on the list as well. He has some toy tools that often are “good enough,” but really nothing compares to the real thing for him. Long ago I got a set with something like 30 screwdrivers in it. For a long time there’d be two or three days a week that he’d sneak out into the garage, open the drawer of the workbench, and pull out 4-5 screwdrivers. He’d then proceed to carry them around the house, often for hours at a time, until eventually we forcefully remove them from his hands (much to his displeasure).

(Interestingly, he seems to alternate his passion for screwdrivers with a similar love of measuring spoons — he’s frequently been known to pull a chair over to the counter and climb up to the cupboard where the measuring spoons are kept, and likewise pull out three or four which he’ll carry around and even sleep with unless we forcefully extract them from his hands. But that’s all beside the point.)

Sometimes when I have a project around the house, I’ll try to occupy him by inviting him to help me. This usually consists of him holding a couple of screwdrivers or other tools and getting in my way (unintentionally) as much as possible — in such circumstances he’s not really content with just holding the tools, and wants to actually be involved in fixing whatever it is that’s being fixed. That’s the key word in his mind: “fix.” When I replaced the doorknobs on several doors, he was right there “fixing” the doors with me. When I was taking apart the door panels of a car, he “fixed” the car too. Just last week I was assembling a saw stand in the garage, and he grabbed a handful of tools and set to work “fixing” his toy lawnmower. (Mowing the lawn is another of his passions.)

But in fact, none of those are the actual event which I intended to relate when I started writing this. Just a few days ago, I was making pancakes and Adam was helping (yes, he used the measuring spoons to dump in most of the ingredients). I have a kitchen device that is basically a pancake batter pourer — it’s like a large cup with a hole in the bottom that’s blocked by a plug, and when you press down on a button it opens the plug and lets out the batter onto the griddle. However, the last time I had used it I twisted it wrong while trying to clean it, and it got a crack in the side of the “cup” part. I really like this thing, and I’ve never seen it sold on its own. (It was given to me as a gift in a set with one of those “as seen on TV” pancake cooker pans — the pan is nice, but the batter pourer is a wonderful thing, in spite of the fact that it’s really just one of the “but wait, there’s more! You’ll also get the…” additions to the set.)

So anyway, we had a couple of minutes while the griddle heated up, so I decided I’d go get some duct tape out of the garage to try and tape up the crack in the batter pourer, to try and prolong its life a bit (yes, I was really thinking of fixing it with duct tape — as much as I hesitate to admit that in a public document). As I moved toward the garage door I told Adam to just stay put for a minute, that I was going to fix the batter pourer. Notice I said that key word, “fix.” That, combined with the fact that I was heading toward the garage, was enough to trigger a light bulb in Adam’s head. He got an excited look on his face and quickly asked: “are you getting a screwdriver?”

I felt pretty bad telling him that I was only going to get some tape, and that no screwdriver would be involved in the “fixing” process.