A few weeks ago, we were traveling somewhere and Monkey was “playing a game” with Teenager, where he would hide the folded-up straw wrapper and Teenager would have to guess where it was. Monkey had a brilliant place to put it. See the pic below. I wasn’t aware of what was going on in the back seat, but at some point, I turned around and realized Monkey didn’t have his seat belt on. As any good mom would do, I told him to put the seat belt on immediately. So he attempted to, but couldn’t because he has forgotten he had put the paper just inside the latch. At that point, it was too late. The paper had been shoved down into the latch. Since we were flying down the interstate, I couldn’t risk trying to look at it, so we instructed him to move over to the middle seat and sit right next to his brother and that they better get along!!
So the other day, I went out to the car fairly early in the day as it was supposed to get up in the 100’s by the afternoon. After about an hour of messing with the paper and using various tools to get it out, I finally did. I tried to latch the seat belt, but it still wouldn’t go in. Baffled, I started thinking, while looking over in the middle console, where I found the plastic fork with a couple prongs broken off. “Noooo! Noooo!” were the first 2 thoughts in my head followed by some words I won’t say here. I went inside and ask Monkey if he or his brother had tried to get the paper out with a plastic fork and he said, “Yes, Teeanger tried to help by using the plastic fork and it broke off in there.”
After another hour, lots of bad words running through my head, a gallon of sweat excreted from my pours, and a trip to Walgreens for batteries for the flashlight, I finally got the plastic prong out. Luckily, that fixed it! So teach your children not to put stuff in the seatbelt latch and save yourself a lot a trouble. 🙂
