Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I wanted to share the proud papa moment: my son did his first full DIY on his own!

First Full Junior DIY

My son is one that enjoys getting his hands into a situation. This time is no different! We had a broken toilet flush handle and my wife has been complaining about it for a few weeks. The tipping point is when she couldn't flush it in the middle of the night without a bunch of hassle hahaha. The little man and I knew that we had to come in and fix and save the day! :D

With this one though, I wanted to challenge the little man! I wanted to see if he could fix the whole thing by himself without getting much help from me and he rose to the challenge that's for sure!

I had to help him on some of the things of course, but for the most part most of this stuff was done by him! We took the lid from the toilet off ourselves and put it down safely out of the way. He was familiarizing himself with the components inside the toilet and was asking me questions about what the things were and what they did. We finished our little lesson and we opened the new flusher handle and I asked him if he wanted to do the job himself, which he enthusiastically said yes!

One of the things that took a little figuring out was how to get the old one off. I had put this one on a few years ago and it was sadly a cheaper model, so it ended up breaking unlike the old, stronger ones. Live and learn, I suppose!

He took the old one out, he had to figure out how to get the wing nut off and we enlisted the help of some adjustable clamp pliers to get the job done. He loosened the nut and was able to make some adjustments to the angle of the old handle and slid the thing right on out. He was pretty excited and happy that he was able to get that part figured out without a lot of help from me, which is a solid win for sure! I know as parents, it can be difficult sometimes to not jump in and do the work, I know I've done that a number of times with my son and it's instinctual in some ways but it's not beneficial for the kiddos! They need to be able to experience a situation where they have to figure the thing out for themselves, with a little bit of guidance from us of course.

That's easier said than done, let me tell you! I know I'm not the best at it still and I likely will never be amazing but the important thing is that I'm trying and I recognize that I need to step back and let him do these things with me and to take charge of some of it as well. That's a huge way to increase their confidence in the world and make it so that they will be able to figure things out with their brain and skills when the time comes when I'm not there to help him figure something out.

Getting the new one in there was a little bit of a struggle, to sit properly. We got it in there fine the first three times but the flush handle never sat the right way lol. We eventually adjusted the thing a few times and it finally was the right angle and all that, so the little man got everything connected back up, we gave it a test flush and things were golden!

I am super proud of the little dude, he did awesome at this job here and you could see the giant smile on his face when we were done! He loves being able to do these types of things for himself and I know that I am doing the best service that I can for him, instilling these things in him while he's young. He's always been interested in tools, building things and all that just like I was as a kid and I think just like many other boys when they are growing up. I know I was always getting into trouble with my dads tools and tool boxes, moving things around and all that when he wasn't around. It was great to play with them but it tended to get me in trouble when he was looking for something LOL oops! :D

I'm sure this isn't the only one that he will be doing over the coming months that's for sure! My wife has a few different things that she would like done, so I'm going to see what we can employ the little man with. If we can get this to occur more often, he will get a little money out of it the way he would if it was a real job!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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