Our young Bluey helped fix the toilet today.
An important lifeskill is being able to complete some small repair to your home. Whether you rent or own, you should know how to do a few simple things from changing a fuse to working a plunger.
When our toilet recently decided to keep running long after the flush, we tried the ol’ jiggling-the-handle trick. But it was a no go. So we pulled off the tank lid to look inside. And instantly, our Bluey was at our side asking how this thing worked. And how we might be able to fix it. Bluey holds an unwavering belief that we can fix anything.
So we started explaining to him how the toilet works. The handle is a lever and it lifts this connection that lets the water out of the tank, the float is at the end of another lever that is attached to this valve here, etc…. We can talk to him confidently about things like levers and syphons and screws in part, because he is an avid fan of David MacCaulay’s, The Way Things Work. Bluey has gone through the book several times and we’ve read most of the sections repeatedly.
We showed him the part of the book that explains how toilets work. Then we talked him through what we’d need to do to make our toilet function correctly. And together, Bluey and TRDad fixed the toilet!
We love when our daily lives cross so nicely with the things we are studying and teaching at home.
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