Teamwork

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Teamwork Tale:

My children are working together more and more of late.  Today they decided they wanted to get coins out of the slot machine.   Mind you that there were at least fifty coins out already.  Consider that the machine wasn't on and couldn't be played.  Don't forget they don't know what money is or that the coins in the machine are tokens instead of spendable cash.  None of that mattered, they were on a mission. 

The coins they were trying to get were in the center of the machine and to most people, unreachable because if we could just reach into a machine and take out money, we'd all be winners.   They discovered there was access through the back of the machine to the internal coin hopper.  They didn't discover this so much as they watched an older child pull out handfuls of coins and learned the secret.  Usually, slot machines are mounted or protected in such a way that we can't just reach around to the back but this old wall-mounted model has an exposed back because when installed, it would be behind a wall.

First my children dragged a chair over to the machine.  Then, my daughter got on the chair and started telling my son what to do.   I couldn't see my son from my office desk chair, but I could tell he was behind the table the slot machine sits on and he was doing something that was producing a banging/scraping sound. 

I heard my daughter say, "Greyson, could you reach them?" to which my son replied, "yeah, I could with my hook."  So now I'm curious and I get up to find out what's happening.

My daughter is standing on the stool, giving him more directions and asking follow-up questions.  My son is standing on the floor, trying to get his plastic golf club into the hole in the back.  The angle was wrong, the size of the plastic club head was too large and he wasn't going to "hook" a single token with his current plan.   But they didn't know that.

They worked on for another few minutes when suddenly my daughter discovered there were coins in the pay-out try all along.  Mission accomplished?   I'm not sure, but they were both happy about it.