Three Year Olds, Quarters & Cars.....Don't Mix

A couple of months ago, Tommy and his friend were playing in the car and decided it was fun to shove quarters in the CD slot. I am sure it was fun for them at the time, but it pretty much killed the radio/CD player. It was not a fast death. Every once in awhile, we would hit a bump and it would start working, then we would hit another bump and it would stop working agian. Then it quit all together. We were forced to play pandora via the speaker phone on Amy's Driod. Not the best quality but it worked. Last Wednesday we decided to invest in a new car audio system, so we would not have to rely on the speaker phone. When we told Tommy that we were going to get a new CD player, he became exicted and explained to us how he was going to put quarters in the new CD player. We eventually convinced him that he should not do this. So now everytime he gets in the car, he states loudly "Don't put the quarters in the radio!!!".

While he understands that he is not supposed to put quarters in the radio, he does not know that he is not supposed to put quarters in the consol covering the shifter assembly.

This afternoon Tommy was playing in the car while we were outside. He was up near the radio, but he kept yelling "I am playing with quarters, but I don't put them in the radio". Eventually, we came back inside to get ready for bed. While I was putting the kids to bed, Amy went to Target to get some much needed ice cream. As I am putting Tommy to bed, the phone rings. It is Amy. She says that she can not get the car into park, thus she can not remove the key from the car, thus she can not go into Target, thus we won't have any ice cream tonight. She comes home and sure enough the car won't go into park and we cannot take the key out of the ignition. Neither of us know much about cars, but we do know how to use google. A couple of quick searches leads us to believe that some thing is wrong with the shifter assembly or shifter cable. The fix looks fairly straight forward, so we start disasembling the consol to see if we can fix it. Note Tommy is in the car with us, because he did not want to go to bed. What do we find......a FRIGGIN QUARTER preventing the shifter from fully engaging into park. Below is a picture of the bent quarter.

When Tommy see's the quarter he says "Mommy did you put the quarter in there".