If you think about it, as long as a child is successfully rescued from inside one of those claw toy machines, it’s kind of a win-win: You get to spend time in a box stuffed full of toys, and you’ll be set for life as an adult with a great icebreaker story to tell at parties about the one time you somehow climbed into a claw machine as a kid. That’s the tale a boy in Tennessee will have to tell for years to come, joining the club of every child’s dreams.

He also gets to add “saved by a bunch of firefighters” to the story, reports WBIR.com (warning: link has video that autoplays), after he managed to wiggle his way inside the toy machine at a coin laundromat this week.

His grandmother says she looked away from the 18-month-old for just a second to check a text message, and by the time she was done, the tot was on his way into the belly of the toy beast.

“All I could see was his feet. He had already crawled in,” she said. “I grabbed his feet and he kicked my hand and got in. Climbed up over the glass partition and sat down in the toys.”

She adds that he loves crawling into and onto everything he can, so she wasn’t that worried once he was ensconced among the plush toys. But she was concerned that he’d hurt himself if he tried to climb back out, as he’d have to climb over a cracked, broken plastic partition.

Firefighters managed to free him in just a few minutes, with the rescuers’ presence causing quite a bit of excitement for the little guy. They even let him pick a toy from the machine to keep.

Welcome to your future, kid. You’ll be telling the story of How I Climbed Inside A Toy Claw Machine When I Was A Kid at parties for years to come, and it’ll never get old. Because all of us secretly would’ve loved to be in there, too. Heck, it’s not even a secret, we’re all jealous.

Toddler climbs into toy machine, gets stuck [WBIR.com]

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