Totally Random Thing number one

Once, when Jake was about 20 months old, we went to have dinner with my Grandmother after Matt got off work.

At that point in time, Matt's job included opening boxes of parts and that day, he had opened a box with his box cutter and when he opened the box, there was a red box cutter laying in it, on the top of the hard drives. He gave a moment's pause to consider the guy in...HardDrive Central, who probably spent some time looking for the darn thing. Matt had stuck it in his pocket and forgot about it until that evening while we were driving to Athens.

We pulled up in front of her apartment and I went to get Jake out. I popped the car seat latch and pushed the Y yoke toward him, waiting for the release 'click' so I could pull it up over his head. Keep in mind this was 1995, so the seat was probably made around '92 or so. It did not release. I let it reel in a little more slack and pulled, still no release. By this point, the fork of the Y was near Jake's neck.

I gave it one more notch, feeling certain THIS time would release it and...nothing. By now, it was under Jake's chin and he was not having it. He was ready to get out anyway and there I was playing with the straps and now they were hurting his neck! He struggled forward and threw himself back against the seat and the straps pulled even tighter, feeding into the winding mechanism and locking tight. I was ready to panic when Matt realized what happened and came to the rescue with the red box cutter! One slice and Jake was free. We replaced the seat that night before coming home.

We called it the Mystical Box Cutter and it lived with us for a few more years, opening packages and helping us with our first move before it moved on out of our lives.

My boy