It's rained almost every day for the past 2.5 weeks. It's getting old.
Despite the weather, we (as in the boys and myself) managed to pull out quite the morning. We concocted our own Rube Goldberg. What's a Rube Goldberg? you might ask. Think Mousetrap, the game. Or watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RouXygRcRC4Ours was AWESOME. Well, not maybe compared to some of the professional ones, but the boys did so well in thinking up everything. Their task was to feed the dog. They essentially designed the whole thing, I served as a logistics consultant but they did 85% of the work. We started by placing a matchbox car racing ramp on the ping pong table. We also put a remote control truck on the table, and tied a string from the truck to the lever that controls the gates on the ramp. When we drove the truck forward, it pulled the string that pulled down the starting gate, and a ball rolled down the ramp and off the table.

The ball hit a cardboard brick, which fell down and knocked down a line of more bricks, dominoes-style.

The last brick had a bottle cap attached to it via silly putty, which held another ball.

When the last brick fell, it went down a ramp and hit a fly wheel type contraption.

Attached to the flywheel was a string that pulled on a can of chicken noodle soup that was just barely balanced on the handle of a foosball table.

When the ball hit the fly wheel, it would pull the string, which would pull the can of soup off.


The can of soup then acted as a counter-weight that turned the foosball handle so that the soccer guy kicked a ball into the goal.

The ball would go into the goal and hit a special collecting ramp and go down the track.

At the bottom of the track was a plastic cup of dog food, which would dump into Marley's bowl.

It was so cute and awesome and I can't believe how hard they worked on it. It took about three hours but they were so diligent. We had so much fun1