Phineas Lives Here

My girls are stuck on a Disney show called "Phineas and Ferb." For those who don't know it, every episode follows the shenanigans of two brothers who are constantly making inventions and whose older sister, Candace, is always trying to "bust" them making these things. And they don't just make things: they will make forts that are 10 stories tall, rockets that go to the moon, submarines that they can shrink to explore the microscopic world, and so on and so forth.

One morning Lindsey decided she wanted to make a time machine. So she asked for some cardboard boxes, got some fuzzy pipe cleaners and tape and went to work.

When she explained what her machine did, it's actually more of a transmogrifier (to use a Calvin and Hobbes term) than a time machine. You push a button telling it what you want to transform into, enter the machine (the pink and green playtent), and come out acting like whatever button you pushed. Your options are cat, dog, baby or teenager. She had all of us get in and test it out -- it worked pretty well, although for a while she had two teenagers for parents and nobody knew who was really in charge.

Here she's demonstrating how you push the button to choose what you want to transform into.

She also had a clipboard made of a piece of cardboard in which she recorded who had used the time machine and what they transformed into. We all had to re-enter the time machine to transform back, especially me since I had to become responsible enough to make dinner. Otherwise it might've been Mountain Dew and Pringles for dinner.