With generous help from my construction school classmates, I finally completed this woodworking project, which, I had to explain to them, is a baby gym. A baby lies under it and plays with the stuffed animals, kind of like a mobile, but not inside the crib.

I used a jigsaw to cut the plywood, sanded and routered the edges, drilled three holes with a Forstner bit, and used an impact driver to screw the parts together.

After several coats of stain and polyurethane, I traded power tools for sewing machine, to make fuzzy little sea creatures. (The C-shaped orange thing is a shrimp, which my manly classmates denounced as “terrifying.”)

Boom! Just like that, a baby gym.

It only took me 127 hours.

But I would do just about anything for the little creature it’s intended for. Because all this woodworking blather is just an excuse to announce that my brother and sister-in-law (a shrimp-focused marine biologist) had a baby girl!

And I’m holding the baby gym hostage so she’ll come and visit her aunt.