If I had a hammer

I have a head cold. And a toddler with a head cold, which leaves her pissy but with energy (NOT a good combination, in case you were wondering). This is totally unfair. To deal with it all while queasily pregnant is just kicking a girl while she's down. Zoe 's well enough to bounce off the walls at home and to go to daycare on her daycare days (No vomit? No fever? No oozing boils? She's good to go!) but not well enough to mix with the stay at home moms and kids at our usual home-day haunts. OY. Today I resorted to opening a bag of cotton balls and letting her loose with bowls and cups and spoons. She spent over an hour happily playing by herself with these. SCORE! Now, of course, I didn't quite think about the inevitable fuzz on my carpet. Vacuum, I know you've been enjoying this hiatus as much as I have but I'm afraid your rest time is over. Here I come!

Yesterday, while desperately looking for something to occupy Zoe, I decided to set up the stools we bought from Ikea recently. I had been waiting for CG to okay them and to set them up himself. He is, after all, the dedicated handy man around here. But the natives were restless and I was out of other ideas so I opened them up and proceeded to bang in the legs with a hammer. Zoe was so excited about it all, jumping up and down and yelling "Yay Mommy! Mommy fixing SOOLS!". I was shocked to realize that this was the first time that Zoe had seen me do something like this.

This made me so sad.

While I'm not exactly mechanically gifted by any stretch, I have long cultivated a 'handy woman' persona. When I went off to college, my dad sent me off with my very own red toolbox, filled with hammers, nails, screwdrivers, wrenches, you name it. I eventually became well known on my hall as the girl who could hang your Monet prints and help you turn off your radiator. I loved that. My tool box came with me to San Francisco where I was, once again, the handy one in my house of four women. By then I had a cordless drill and had filled in doorways, hung light fixtures and painted rooms by myself. I felt pretty handy.

Enter CG. The handiest person known to man. His skills include plumbing, electrical, and woodworking. He's got more tools than anyone else I know (except my dad. Paging Dr. Freud!) He's installed dishwashers, built furniture, saved us thousands of dollars in plumbing bills and tried to teach our daughter the basics of electrical circuits.
He does ALL the fixing around here. I have quickly and easily deferred all handy type activities to him. He'll be able to do it faster, better and easier than I can, so why bother.

Why bother? I need to bother so that Zoe can watch her mom hammer in some stool legs and yell "yay Mommy!". So that she doesn't assume that Daddy (or a man, in general) is the only one who can fix things around here. So that she wants to pick up her own hammer one day.