[ihc] My daughter's project was a darn horse, but then there was ....

[John Hofstetter <hofs@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Aug 30, 2004, at 2:20 PM, Jim Grammer wrote:

> Building her A-120 T-all is gonna be a hoot...
>
> Jim
There is putting things together and there is taking apart. When our 
oldest son, who is now in charge of a big heavy equipment shop, was 
little, we couldn't keep stuff around our house together. The darn kid 
woke up every morning about 5 am and by the time we would get up, he'd 
have used a table knife to remove the covers off of duplex electrical 
outlets, sometimes he would take the outlets out too leaving big chunks 
burned out of the knives.

He would take the screws out of the door hinges, the knobs off the 
cupboards, the back off the television, and on and on. We kept getting 
phone calls from people who had visited us asking if we had noticed 
their gas caps anywhere around our place, but we never did. Years later 
when I tore down an old out building I found a cache of about 30 gas 
caps that had been deposited between the walls by dumping them into a 
big knot hole in the inner wall.

So,, when he was about 4,  I bought him a Rambler American sedan and 
fixed him up a tool box. Before we got up in the morning, he would go 
out to that car and proceed to take it apart. His mother would go out 
at noon, haul him out of the car, feed him, clean him up, put him down 
for a nap, from which, when he awakened, he would return to the car. He 
worked on that car until he went off to Kindergarten. He was able to 
take an amazing amount of things apart, but at that point he had no 
interest in putting things back together.

School was never his thing, he never could really learn to read, but we 
never had any doubt that he would be able to earn a good living. 
Besides which he is a really good man and a great dad. Good enough for 
us.

John

John Hofstetter
Ol' Saline
www.goldrush.com/~hofs