It’s been difficult for me to get out and do much of anything gun related lately. Life has thrown me a few curve balls and the weather has not been playing in my favor either. Safe to say, I was itching to at least get my hands on something gun related . . .
Interestingly enough, my son (who is not yet in preschool) came to me with his box full of blocks and asked me what we can do with them. My mind immediately went to one thing. We can disassemble a Mosin-Nagant bolt.
Now, honestly, this was the hardest thing I’ve learned to do so far in the world of guns. My hands are small and I’ve been pinched and bled more times than I can count by a Mosin bolt. But as soon as I brought it downstairs to show my son, he got excited.
He jumped up and asked if we were “gonna fix that shiny thing!” His excitement makes things easier for me. When I told him it’s a bolt from my gun, the questions began to fly.
“What’s a bolt?” “How are we gonna use my blocks to fix that?” “Why does this thing smell?” (Cosmoline).
As I explained that the bolt is the part of the rifle that pushes the cartridge into the barrel so it’s ready to shoot, he got a lot more excited. My son loves springs. I couldn’t wait to show him that there’s a spring inside this bolt that we can take out and he can hold.
As I broke down the bolt, he fired more questions at me. When I asked him for a block from his box so I could compress the spring and spin the top piece off, he excitedly handed me the “biggest block he could find in his box.” When I removed the spring he jumped up and said “Oh mommy! Can I hold the spring? Please?” So of course I let him.
He went through and looked at all the other pieces of the bolt, and then said “now can we put it back together?” Of course, we did. Well, I did. He watched and narrated my every move.
As soon as my husband got home from work, all our son could talk was how “Mommy let me do fun stuff today! I got to hold a spring. And it was a big one!” And that’s how my son and my Mosin ended my winter blues.