The Rescue Truck

Our Uncle Dale brought over some toy vehicles he had from when he was a child some time back.  They were toys you play with outside and were big enough for a small boy and girl to have a lot of fun with them.  There was a dump truck, a grader, a bull dozer, and a tow truck. 

Of all the toys, the tow truck is by far my son's favorite.  Remember his, "hooking" obsession?  Take that and add to it a construction vehicle and then, to make it even better, add not one, but two hooks.  He is in love with this truck.  He calls it his, "Rescue Truck" and would happily spend over an hour just seeing what he can hook up with this truck.

The strings holding the two hooks are quite old, and one of them had broken a few times so I decided to replace the string.  I got what I thought was sturdy string, but it turned out not to be up to my son's level of tugging and towing and pulling and it broke.  It was when it broke that was worrisome. 

And that's mostly because the hooks on the end of the ropes are very nice and just perfect for the truck and absolutely, positively not the piece you'd want to lose.  It was coincidental that my son decided on the day the string broke to take the truck all the way down to the cul-de-sac and play with it in several neighbor's yards.

He came up later and I noticed the string was broken and the hook no where to be found.   So I asked my son if he knew where the hook part was.  He said he did and walked me all the way down to the neighbor's house and showed me how it was hooked onto this piece of their basketball hoop stand.  I was relieved.

But I didn't have better string to fix the tow truck with at the time so I hid the truck from him.  Today, my father brought me several options of more sturdy string and one matched very closely to the original string (which was now quite brown as opposed to the general white it probably started out as).

We got home from dinner and I told him I was going to fix his rescue truck while he rode on his balance bike.  I got it fixed and after it got dark he spent a long time in the garage playing with his truck very happily and very quietly.

The Big Boy Update:  The little Rescue Truck that could.  He will ask his rescue truck to do seven impossibly things a day.  Tonight he hooked it up to their riding car (which is both large and heavy) and was quite hopeful there would be successful towing happening shortly.  It's still sitting there in the dark garage right now, hooked onto the big car, not making any towing headway.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Riding too fast.  She didn't learn from the last time she fell off the tricycle going to fast.  Daddy had her put on her helmet, which was a good thing because she only got a bloody lip.  Will she remember and go more slowly from now on?  We shall see.