Mr. Fix-It

In any house, there is always the occasional need to repair things.  But with three small kids, that need increases, especially when you have a four-year-old boy who seems to consider breaking things to be among his favorite activities and hobbies.  Lately, it seems like it's been more frequent than ever.  There always seems to be something that needs fixing.  Sometimes things are just irreparably broken, and they get thrown away, but sometimes they're easy fixes, and sometimes they're hard, but doable, fixes.  I do like the challenge of trying to fix the challenging ones.  First, it's fun because it is a challenge.  I sometimes have to come up with clever ways to fix things, so it's a bit of a fun engineering problem.  But aside from the fun of the challenge and the rewarding feeling of having solved it, it's also nice to know that I've saved us some money, at least in the cases where we would have to (or maybe wouldn't have to, but still would) buy a new one if I couldn't repair the broken one.  The latest two challenges were tricky in their own ways.  First, Joshua has a small plastic dump truck for which the small plastic peg that allows the truck bed (is that what it's called for a dump truck?  I don't know.) to pivot broke off.  A dump truck without the dumping part is useless, and Meghan thought it looked unfixable and was thus ready to throw it away.  But I examined it and figured out a way to repair it, and I was able to do so, and now it's good as new.  The other recent one was Woody, from Toy Story.  The kids have a Buzz Lightyear, a Sheriff Woody, and a Jessie, and the latter two have pull-strings to get them to say things from the movie and maybe other phrases the characters don't say in the movies (I don't know the movies that well), and the toys in the movie actually have pull-strings themselves, so they are pretty accurate representations of the movie toys.  Anyway, Woody's pull-string recently broke (and by that I mean that Joshua pulled too hard on it and pulled it out of Woody's back).  It was quite a challenge to fix, as I had to remove and take apart the whole mechanical cylinder, which contains the speaker, microcontroller, etc., and also the spindle for the pull-string.  Using some tricks, I was able to get the pull-string back wound around the spindle and do all the other parts of the process to result in a working pull-string for Woody again.  So now we can again hear Tom Hanks' voice any time we want with a simple pull of a string.