Finleigh Powell knows that giving her child a toy that she found on the street might make some people think she's a bad mom, but she has her reasons for doing so. The mom explained that her 2-year-old has wanted a toy car, just like the one she found outside, for a long time.
"What is better than finding a freebie on the side of the road that just needs a little spruce-up?" Finleigh said on TikTok. The mom admitted that the toy car was "filthy" and "disgusting." On the toy car, "there was everything you could think of inside and out," including a snail family and bird droppings, she said in the video.
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"But hold off on the judgment and wait until you see it at the end because (me and my son) did an absolutely cracking job on this," she said before showing footage of how she and her son went about cleaning the toy car and sprucing it up.
By scrubbing the toy car down — "every nook and cranny" — she transformed it into a toy car that her toddler could actually use.
"I’ll tell you something though, my arms were aching at the end of this. I think I scrubbed it with that brush for about half an hour," the mom admitted. Finleigh said she knew the video would be controversial.
She was planning on buying a toy car for her toddler and the money wasn't an issue, she explained. "But why would you buy something if there's something perfectly fine on the side of the road?" she asked, adding that her family can now use the money they were going to spend on the toy for something else.
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The mom also pointed out that the toy car would've just ended up in a landfill if she hadn't decided to take it and give it to her son.
"So, one, we’ve saved the planet, and two, I’ve saved my bank account, and three, I’ve still got a happy boy at the end of it all," she concluded. "And that is all that matters. What does it matter where it came from? My son is happy and that is all I care about."
Many TikTok users loved the mom's idea. "As long as it's clean, safe and usable then why not?" one person commented.
Another person added that she bought her daughter a new one last year but, "it looks like this now anyway," so buying a brand new one is not necessary.
