Pinewood Fun

I grew up in a class full of Boy Scouts.  Whenever the days of the meetings rolled around most of my male classmates were in school wearing their uniform shirts and kerchiefs with their corresponding animal tie slide.  I tried to find a picture of one of these on Google images but I couldn't find anything like what I am trying to describe.  They were made of plaster or something like that and the boys painted them and the results were...mixed.  During the Pledge in the morning they did their salute and they sold wreaths at Christmas and of course they participated in the Pinewood Derby every year.  

My brother was not a boy scout so I never saw any of these activities as an insider.  Ben is now a Cub Scout.  I don't think I have posted about this yet but during the first few weeks of school he came home with an information sheet which he was pretty excited about because it featured pictures of boys fishing and shooting guns and bows and arrows.  Those activities are generally reserved for older scouts at summer camp but we still signed him up anyway.  In the past boys didn't start until first grade but they have a new program for Kindergarten age kids now and it is less commitment and also fundraising is optional (WHEW!) and they wear a t-shirt instead of the full uniform.  But they did receive a Pinewood Derby car kit upon registration and the big race was Friday night.  

Fortunately, Justin was a scout himself so he knew what to do.  I didn't know this but you put weights on it to make it as close to five pounds as possible.  Interesting.  So, Justin used the power tools (the saw) and Ben picked his design.  Here is the initial sketch.  

His name really is fully backwards there.  It's not just the camera.  He usually doesn't do it like that.  Watching kids learn to write is a fascinating thing.  

Here is the finished car!  

Here is the setup for the races.  

You can see there are six lanes.  According to Justin, back in "the day", in our case the 1990's, they only raced two cars at a time so you could easily see who won.  Now they have a computer system so that little black bar at the end pups up the order of the lanes immediately and the times and speeds pop up on that projection screen on the stage.  Pretty cool. 

They mixed all the age together and every car raced five times.  I'm not saying anything illegitimate was going on but you could definitely see that certain families of brothers and often families of the leaders have experience with this stuff and know what they are doing due to years of experience while some people...do not...like us.  The problem with Ben's car was wobbly wheels which you don't notice when rolling it along a flat surface at a regular speed.  After it dropped off at the beginning of the races though you could really see them shake and it instantly fell behind.  So...it was a bit painful but still fun.  He got a kick out of it and slept with his car tucked in by his bed in it's own blanket that night.  And there were only three (really big and aswesome) trophies but everyone got a badge at least.  And they even had this fun little backdrop set up for pictures.  

It was fun to see Ben having fun and frolicking around with kids from school.  He has made buddies of all ages on the bus and I like it because I have heard about older kids being kind of mean at other schools in town and I have seen parents visibly recoil when they hear my kid rides the bus.  There was one drawback to the evening and his name starts with an M and he just turned two and he doesn't like to sit through things and wants to do whatever he wants when he wants.  Another event survived but leaving me wondering what I was thinking adding another baby who will one day be a toddler to the family.  Haha...joking...kind of...