Well, you sure do live up to your name! :laughing: If a five-dollar Wal-Mart toy would keep him out of my tool box, you better believe I'd do it. He doesn't want plastic tools. He wants the real thing, like his dad has. At this point, my fallback plan is to try to keep him away from tools that can actually injure him, and keep him using them places where he's not going to knock any holes in the wall or what-have-you. As for dropping it, stepping on it, falling on it... if that's the worst thing that happens to him in any given day, I'll call it a win. I turn my back for two seconds and he's climbing up a ten-foot ladder propped against the wall, or climbing the cattle racks on my trailer, or trying to stick a screw into an electric socket. I don't let him do those things, but I have to let him do something with himself or he'll just go crazy with boredom. So he gets to carry around the mallet if he wants to, and if he drops it on his foot, his foot might bruise, but it'll heal, and he'll be okay, and next time maybe he won't drop it. We had a hard time "teaching" him about the electric fence, but we used the same philosophy. We can shoo him away from it all day long, but let him touch it and get shocked a time or three, and he'll keep himself away from it just fine. And he does. Shoot! He reaches over to pick grass or sticks out from the wires and each time, his mom and I cringe, but he's figured it out just like the pigs have, which parts he can and can't touch without getting shocked. My point is that if something is actually dangerous or deadly (guns, knives, a hot wood stove, woodworking chisels, a circular saw), then I'm going to keep it away from him, but if it is only mildly injurious, I'm happy to let him figure it out, even if it means he gets hurt sometimes.
As for throwing it through a window... well, he hasn't quite got the coordination to throw things yet, but if he starts picking up the habit, then I'll reassess his access to heavy projectiles.
