Graham Cracker Smacker

Here's how it all started. My son, Q, is fascinated by all things mechanical. He has a book in the ISpy series in which there's a picture of a convoluted balloon-popping contraption: It involves dominoes, rolling marbles, teeter-totters, pulleys and the like. He has spent many hours looking at that picture. So, one day, I decided to look up Rube Goldberg, the original inventor of such wacky contraptions. And it turned out that were a ton of super-cool videos of amazing contraptions on YouTube, from around the world. Well, Q spent many hours memorizing those contraptions. Then he announced he wanted to build his own. He's full of ideas, that boy. Me, I'm full of ideas, too, but usually they're ideas about music or stories. I'm not really much of a handyman. So we invited a handyman friend, David Jouris, over to help us build a contraption. The goal: Pour a glass of milk, and cause a graham cracker to split into pieces so you can dip it in the glass.

I'm telling you - it may seem short, it may seem simple, but it takes a lot of tinkering to get even THIS little contraption to work. We learned a lot about the concept of patience :)