Saving Rey
On Monday night, I took the kids to wash the car at one of those self-serve stalls. The girls scrubbed with washcloths while I wielded the power-washer soap wand thing, and Sterling played off to the side with his Finn and Rey Star Wars action figures. They go with him everywhere. It used to be Finn and Rey and Maz, but one day as we were walking home from the park, he dropped Maz down a drain and now she "lives in the ocean."
Which brings us to the moment when I finished washing the car and we realized that Sterling was staring intently down the drain in the washing stall. He was holding Finn, but not Rey. We rushed over to the drain and there, just there, through the shimmering, soapy water, we could see her barely floating near the bottom. There must have been a secondary finer mesh drain keeping her from disappearing completely, but still, she was under water and probably ten inches deep, under a thick metal grate that couldn't be removed (I tried).
Thought exercise: you're at the car wash with your three young children. Since you just vacuumed and cleaned the car, it is almost entirely free of miscellaneous clutter (strings, sticks, sticky things, hooks, wrappers, whatever) that could have been helpful to you. Your child's beloved toy needs rescuing. Using only the scant car flotsam available to you, get the job done or break your 2.5-year-old's heart (and the 7-year-old's - she was getting teary-eyed).
Here's what saved me: to my annoyance, twenty minutes earlier, I had noticed that Miriam had left her science camp dry-ice powered boat in the car - it was an unwieldy collection of pop bottles, foam, campfire skewers, and duct tape. I had resentfully vacuumed around it, but now it was my salvation! With Miriam's permission, I stripped it of two of its skewers, two chunks of foam, and two strips of duct tape. Using those materials, I fashioned two little gripping...claw...things, with the sticky side of the duct tape facing out. Shown here.
Then I rehearsed on Finn - I put him on the ground and practiced wedging him between the two sticks and lifting him up. So far so good, but I knew it would be more of a challenge with Rey since she was under water.
The time came. Miriam and I set ourselves up on opposite sides of the drain, so I could grip Rey and bring her up with the skewers and Miriam could grab her head as soon as it cleared the bars of the drain. We tried once...twice...and on the third try, we succeeded! Rey was saved!
Sterling was really happy to get her back. But I'm a little suspicious of him now - to lose one Star Wars action figure may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.
