Pinewood Derby

Tonight was Conner's last pinewood derby race. He has been racing cars for 3 years. It's always a last minute car. We forget when the derby is or we just have so much other stuff going on, that it gets put off until the last minute. So, again, we knew that the derby was coming up. In fact we've even had the "block" for at least a month! However, it wasn't until Sunday that we decided to OPEN the box! We found a design on the internet that looked pretty easy to cut and Conner liked the design. Going off the pictures on the internet, the boys designed the car. They had picture graphs and lines drawn on the wood block. On Monday night, they went over to a friends shop and made the cuts. Then they spent some more time sanding and working out the final details on the design. Conner started painting it last night too. He wanted to paint it orange and black (shocking, I know). I told him that if he got it all painted that I would paint the Beavers logo on it for him. However, the space was WAY to small to paint it, so we just printed one out and glued it on the car (about 2 hours before the race!). Mike came home from work with the weights for the car. They melted them down and had the car ready to go, oh, only about 45 minutes before it was time to leave! Talk about cutting it close!

I had a meeting for Conner's school tonight, so I wasn't able to make the derby. Mike took the kids and they headed off. I got a call from Conner when he was on the way home saying that he had fun and that one of the other boys had a "Duck's" car and he beat it. He was pretty excited about that.

When I got home from my meeting, there was a note on the front door telling me that I needed to go to Conner's room. I headed up there and the first thing I did was look for his certificate. Every boy gets a certificate with some crazy award. They give places for the first 3 cars and then the rest get goofy awards. Because Conner had an OSU car, I was looking for something having to do with that. When I found the certificate I saw that he had FIRST PLACE!!! Yeah. I guess he won every race but one! I'm so sorry that I missed his big night, but it was so fun to sit with him for a while while he replayed the evening. It was nice to see him so exited about something. Now, you have to understand that he usually doesn't fair very well! So, this being his very last pinewood derby before he leave cub scouts, this was awesome! Way to go Conner!

Mike and Conner working out some kinks.

Conner working on his car.

Goofy pic of Conner at the derby.

And no, Mike took pictures and didn't get any of Conner actually holding the finished car!  The video shows it a little at the end.  I'll try to take a pic of Conner with his car tomorrow.