Lazy Friday Approaches! WEEK 10, Day 4

It's been a busy week here at tinkering school. Amanda and Piper have been getting lazier and lazier as the days go by, but luckily, we have concurrently been working hard and adding more and more bizarre tinkery mechanisms to our Lazy Friday machines. We hope to be duly prepared for their afternoon awakening (of course they slept in it's Lazy Friday!).

We started the week out with some careful measurements of our happy (but exhausted-see how they're constantly lying down- we gotta help 'em out) subjects:

This created an interesting design challenge for kids to think through- creating machines that would work for people of two fairly different heights. 

From there, tinkering began in earnest- fulcrums, pulleys, coat hangers, velcro, and whisks in unexpected places all made appearances as we tried harder than usual, messed lots of things up and learned from our mistakes, and practiced thinking ahead and using kind tones of voice even when things weren't working.

Some tinkerers even figured out how to crack an egg without touching it:

Communication has been particularly interesting and fruitful (and often hilarious) as a learning opportunity for adults and kids alike this week, since we're creating a Lazy-Friday-Machine language where none existed before (as far as we know):

But really, who hasn't snuggled under the covers in the winter, wishing for a machine to make the tea and toast, turn on the light, and put the sweatshirt directly on, with the only effort expended being the pull of a string?

Of course, it's important to note that the laziness of some is being enabled by the extreme hard work of others behind the scenes (but we like hard work and sometimes it's also fun collaborative work- plus A and P have been working really hard all summer for our happiness which is why they're going to be so tired on Friday- so that works out):

As Friday afternoon fast approaches, we can't wait to test out our machines and help out our hard-working, exhausted friends Amanda and Piper as they blearily open their eyes and get woken up, clothed, and served breakfast with *hopefully* only a little sawdust in it.