Pinewood Derby, Take 3

What?  What's that you say?  That having a blog means I'm supposed to occasionally write things down and post them?  Oh ok, cool.  I'll try it.

Yes, hello.  Having a wee bit of a busy month.  Hard to even know where to begin. I guess I'll start at the beginning of the month...

On the first Saturday this month Stomper competed in his 3rd and final Pinewood Derby.  It's a little bitter-sweet!  Troy looked forward for so long to building derby cars with his son and now suddenly they are done.  It was great.  Except for the fact that we procrastinated a bit too long on getting the car actually made so the week before the derby Troy spent every minute of his away from the office time working on the car, as much with Stomper as he could.  And it paid off - for the second year in a row Stomper took 1st place!  Very exciting.

I loved his design this year:  a dragon complete with a row of scales running down his spine.  I think we have spoiled Stomper - it has been so fun to just ask him for his vision and then try to make it happen that he now has no qualms now about coming up with really outrageous ideas. Thankfully Troy is quite ingenious and made it happen.  It was a good looking car.

Also in on the fun this year was Bitty.  She clearly remembered how last year the younger sister of a scout made a cool pink station wagon kind of car and entered it into the exhibition race at the end.  Bitty begged to have a car in the race this year too and we couldn't help but give in - after all, it was the last year we would be invited to be a part of the race and Bitty doesn't have the chance to do anything else like it.  So next to Stomper's sleek and scary dragon we had Bitty's tall blue station-wagon looking thing.  Actually we decided it looks a lot like a Toyota LandCruiser FJ60, and thus it is extremely cool. And also faster than you would guess.

Not to be left out (duh, Rachel, why didn't you buy TWO extra derby kids instead of just one?) Bundle saw Bitty's car and promptly began a campaign of her own to get a car in the race.  I knew just how stressed Troy was already to get the two cars done so I couldn't bring myself to ask him to do just one more.  Luckily Stomper had received for a birthday gift a little wooden airplane kit that he hadn't gotten around to building yet and was willing to generously donate to the cause. I set Bundle in front of that with a row of paints and a few brushes.  After an hour it was absolutely covered in multiple layers of bright paints.  It wasn't anywhere near to derby specifications; it did have wheels but they didn't even fit on the track.  That didn't seem to matter to Bundle; she was ecstatic to be in the final races no matter that you had to manually slide her plane down the track.

So, it's been a good run for us.  I'm a little sad to see that era end, and I'm sure my husband is too.  A little. Okay, if he's sad then he's exactly the same amount happy as well.  Those little cars take  a lot of manpower to get built.  Happily, we now have three sitting proudly on Stomper's display shelf.  Plus one station wagon.

This is Stomper's good buddy from his 4th grade class - such a good kid.  He took second place and was a great sport and was hugging Stomper in congratulations.  Another good friend took fourth place - what a great group of boys!!