I know EXACTLY what a keyless chuck is.

Last night an incident occurred which made it necessary for me to disassemble the bed frame. (Just bear with me here.) Steven had assured me that he would fix the bed while I was at work today, but when I arrived home, lo and behold (ahem), the mattress was still leaning up against one wall of our hallway, and the box springs was sitting cockeyed, partially on the frame. There were various pieces of hardware strewn about the floor. As it turned out, he had very valiantly made a trip to the hardware store and attempted to fix the bed, only to be stymied by a stubborn piece of an old bolt that would NOT come out of its little hiding hole to be replaced.

So when I walked in the front door, I was met with the still inflated, queen sized, non-matrimonial (that's a whole other story) air mattress that we slept on last night. The still inflated, queen sized, non-matrimonial air mattress that was still occupying the entire expanse of the living room floor. We live in a very small, two bedroom apartment. A very small. Two bedroom. Apartment. Did I mention that it is small? So there is a fully inflated air mattress taking up residence in the living room, a full sized mattress leaning up against the wall of a very short, very narrow hallway, and in the cluttered master bedroom, there is a broken bed frame and a set of box springs.

I am about to have to go pick up my three-yr-old son at daycare. And bring him home to a living room with an inflatable air mattress occupying the entire floor space, a hallway partially blocked by a mattress, and a bedroom with...do I seriously have to explain this again? You get the point. I am not happy.

So, in a rare fit of taking-matters-into-my-own-hands-I-am-woman-hear-me-roar-watch-my-perfectly-efficient-use-of-power-tools fueled energy blast, I decided that rather than trying to fix the frame, I'm just going to take the whole thing apart, cart it out to the garage, and set the box springs and mattress directly on the floor. We're moving in two months anyway; I can deal with this arrangement for two months. Then maybe I'll buy a new and improved, bigger, less likely to break bed frame.  

So first things first, I need to deflate the air mattress and put it and all the extra bedding away. After approximately thirty minutes of wrestling around on the floor with the big hunk of velour-topped plastic, folding and rolling and mashing it this way and that in an attempt to makeitfit back in the stupid bag it came in, it is time for me to go pick up the little dude.

Once home, he immediately wants to play video games, so I figure I still have a chance to get the rest of this pesky problem under control and not have to sleep on the couch tonight. I grab my MY MY (yet another story) new cordless drill and stalk down the hallway to the bedroom. I'm barking like Tim Allen from Home Improvement and I'm ready to use a power tool! After I've removed the first couple of bolts, Eliot wanders down the hall, still partially in his Little Big Planet-induced coma, to see what's going on. Once he discovers what I'm doing in the bedroom, and that it involves tools, the PS3 controller is hastily set aside in favor of the cordless drill. I let him spin it around in the empty holes when I'm not using it.

To make a long story not all that much shorter, let's just say that the frame was successfully taken apart, amid much discussion/explanation of nuts and bolts and washers, and why we don't drill people or the apartment walls, only holes in furniture that are already there.

It was kind of a revelation, getting this task accomplished on my own, and letting Eliot "help." [It was like the antidote to the stunt I pulled last night, wherein I screamed "Girl! I'm a Girl! Giiiiiiiiiirlllll!" to explain to Panepinto why HE needed to be the one to take the trash out at midnight in the freezing cold.] All joking aside, it's important to me that Eliot grow up seeing me as a self-sufficient person, a woman who fixes her own problems rather than waiting for a man to fix them for her. It's important to me that I be that person, and important for me to show that person to my son. As these self-satisfied thoughts were dancing through my mind, I quickly came to the conclusion (and broadcast it as my latest Facebook status) that "I need to periodically use power tools to assemble/disassemble things around the house so that my son will grow up with a full appreciation of what a total badass his momma is."

I figure this tactic will be more suitable than explaining to him why the bed broke in the first place, which, basically, is also because Momma is AWESOME.


Flashback: "Why are you taking the bed apart, Mom?"
"Because it's broken."
"How did it get broken?"
"Well...I think...probably...it just was getting old...or something."