Pinewood Derby

The boys participated in their first ever Pinewood Derby with Cub Scouts last weekend. They worked on their cars for several weeks prior to the event, it's all very scientific. There are aisles set up at Hobby Town for all the things you need to make these cars awesome. Happy to say the boys did a lot of the work themselves.

 

 Painting the cars. That was a bit of a chore. Hard to spray paint outside when it is 15 degrees!

 The finished products. I cut out stencils for them with my die-cut machine I use for scrapbooking. They painted and Brian helped them assemble wheels and weigh (it has to weigh less than 5 oz)

 The day of the race. This was held in the multi-purpose room of their school. Nice and close!

 One heat. Each kid raced their car 4 times, one in each lane. In this picture, Will is in lane 2 and Xander in lane 3. This was one of the later heats. Xander's car fell off the track in his first heat, but he still did pretty good in his later heats. Will's car won all his heats....more on that later.

 Will's car, coming up on the finish line!

 The final scoreboard! That's right folks, Will got 1st place and Xander 3rd! I am so proud of the boys! They did a great job on their cars. You can see Will's average time, 3.7367 and Xander's 3.8307 and that's with only 3 times averaged because of falling off the first time. They only raced against boys in their den, 1st graders, or Tiger Cubs. The other dens like Webelos and Wolf Cub raced against each other separately. But, Will's car got to go to the finals. He did pretty well there, he won 1 heat, but didn't place in the top 4 of overall finishers. Some of those older boys had fast cars!

 

However, winning his den means he gets to race his car again at the district Pinewood Derby race in March, so he is excited about that!

 Xander getting his trophy!

 

Will getting his trophy.

 

 All of the entries in the Tiger Cub den. Some pretty fancy ones!

 

The boys and their trophies! They were pretty excited!

 

Other than this exciting Pinewood Derby day, not much else has been happening around here. It's been so cold that we're just sticking indoors, and tapping our toes impatiently, waiting for spring to arrive! The kids have been enjoying playing lots of video games, and I'm happy to report they've behaved well enough to earn them (that isn't always the case, you know!!). The kids' piano teacher had a baby last week, so we are on a 2 month hiatus from piano lessons. Unluckily for the kids, they have a parent or two who know a few things about piano. So.....I am the piano "teacher" now until we go back after Spring Break. We're just having short, informal lessons on Thursday when we would normally have lessons and I'm just giving them new stuff to practice for the next week. So, we're still chugging along. They are scheduled to play in a festival in April, so we'll start preparing for that soon.

 

Well, that is about all our news for now! Hope everyone is staying warm and dry during these cold days and nights. We sure enjoyed our snow day last week, wouldn't mind one more before the winter is over! Take care!!