Children and Furniture

We all know about the spills, the stains, the rips in the upholstery, the occassional "accident". Furniture in a house with little ones does take a beating for sure. But I think my experience this past Thursday is about as bad as it gets.
First, a little descriptive information: I have my laptop in the kitchen on a countertop/desk, and we have a 24 inch wooden barstool that we sit on. The barstool is one of a pair we had when we moved from our townhouse that had a breakfast bar. Anyway. It's wooden, and the back has wooden rungs. When I'm not using the computer, you can usually find Jonathan on it. He likes to play noggin.com, or sometimes fool around with Paint or Word, or sometimes he likes to "check" (more like destroy) Mommy's email. So the other day, he's playing on the computer and I'm cooking dinner, and all the sudden, he starts to whimper a bit. At first I ignored it - I was actually on the phone at the time, but it started to escalate and when I finally did look over at him, I see that he had somehow pushed his leg through one set of rungs all the way up to his thigh, and he couldn't get it out.
Well, niether could I. I tried everything - different angles, different heights. I tried to bend his leg through, I tried to straighten it - nothing worked. I figured I had three options left - get out the Crisco (yuck), call the fire department, or get out the saw. And by this time, about 10 minutes later, Jonathan was pretty worked up. And he was starting to complain that his leg was really hurting him.
So I reached for the saw. Sawed through one of the rungs well above his leg and we managed to squeeze it to the side just enough to get the leg out. No harm done. Except to my chair. Which is fine - like I said, we have it's twin somewhere downstairs, and truthfully, those stools were never all that comfortable anyway. But it's a lesson learned if nothing else - don't invest in the good stuff until your kids are at LEAST old enough to not pull that kind of stuff. And even then, I'm still not sure it's worth it!
But in the end, it's just furniture, it can be replaced. Unlike some other precious things! :-)