Pinewood Derby 2019

In a few days into January they told us that Pinewood Derby got moved up to January 19th and oh yeah parents were in charge of planning.  I am afraid that how well it all went means they are going to feel vindicated giving us so little notice and so little guidance.  Instead, it went well in spite of how chaotic the organization ones.  But, as me and the other mother who took over the event said, you can't complain too much about a volunteer organization.

That is cold comfort though, I'm afraid, when you're cutting out 100 pit passes by hand and then assembling said passes ... by yourself ... because no one else has time and you have emails of your particular Den and not the entire Pack.

So I was in charge of paper products and decor.  The theme was Fortnite.  I was not pleased.  I'll digress here a bit ...

Fortnite is an online video game that is mega popular right now.  It's taken over for Minecraft as being the topic de jour among the boys at the lunch table.  Much to my 8yo chagrin we don't own it and won't ... if you scroll to the very, very bottom of that link up there you'll see it's rated T for teen due to violence.  To compare ... if you scroll down to the very, very bottom of the Minecraft website, it's rated E for everyone.  When things try to make my parenting life easy, I tend to use them.  So for our house, it's just follow the rating system.  Fortnite is also, a first person shooter that mainly takes place on line.  100 people get randomly dropped into a "world" and they have to "kill" each other.  The last person standing is the winner.

There are gamers making millions of dollars off this game.  They stream the games that they play and folks watch and follow them on YouTube.  A major league baseball player that I follow has a channel and I wonder what he pulls in from it.  They run advertising throughout.  They have thousands and thousands of eye balls. 

Most of them children.

So to their credit there is no blood and guts.  You just disappear into a puff of smoke and the avatars dance and do fun things and the kids think it's a riot.  There's a llama that apparently gives you supplies and he's funny looking.

My main problem with this game?  Aside from the violence ... is its online.  I assume there's probably some setting you could pick to limit who you're paired with (I have no clue, maybe there isn't) but the standing rule in our house is if some stranger can talk to you on the game you aren't allowed to play.  The kids play games on iPads and as soon as they notice a chat feature they're supposed to come tell me and we either turn it off or delete it.

At any rate so call me over protective or controlling or a helicopter or be like me and call me prudent ... but I wasn't happy with the theme for an event that included 5yo kindergartners.  Mostly because it was requested that we print out large poster size renderings of the avatars.

I will let you go look at what women look like in this video game.

That was a hard no for me.  A pretty loud no.

And since I was printing it and I was doing it ... I just ... didn't.  I did the llama.  Also, if you were wondering why llamas are everywhere right now this game is why.

Anyway that's a lot of build up.  But suffice it to say I lived and breathed pinewood derby until the day arrived.

With Lew's travel schedule I helped a lot with the boys cars in the final days.  Weight becomes an issue and this year the siblings cars were too heavy.  But Lewis had aligned the wheels already and at check in didn't want to take them off (I had to volunteer at check-in too so he was on his own).  So he had to drill a lot of weight out of the body of Julia and David's cars.  

Grady's car ... the car that would have the most competition and needed to be near perfect ... I left weight off on purpose.  I had weighed the car on two scales and gotten two different weights and check in would be a third scale.  My scale said 5oz on the nose.  The weigh in scale said 4.8.  So dropped some more weight on top and it was good to go.

After lots of drilling the sibling cars were ready to go and everyone was checked in.

There are so many good cars.  The kids put so much effort into these.  Some you can tell have a lot of help.  I make G (to a lesser extent D) polish his own axels, sand the car, paint the car, hammer the wheels (Dad did correct this some), and glue on the top weights.  His is that gray one there, with the two weights on top, David's is behind him, Julia is the purple one behind his.

The ages all compete against each other.  So Bears against Bears, Tigers against Tigers, etc.  So in this race Grady was competing against his best friend.  E's car was very fast, so G either came in first or second here.  It was competitive in our age group.  As it should be, it's these boys third year to compete.

First place finish.

Time for the awards.

There are some design awards.  I do not know the criteria or how he was picked, but he won the award for most intimidating design.  I think the judges (random grandparent aged folks in the audience) were instructed to pick cars that looked like they had been completed by kids (with help, but mostly by the kids).  But I don't know.  Either way he was stunned.

This guy.  He was so tense through all of the races.  He was determined to get a trophy this year because his 2yo sister got one last year with a stock car with little effort put in (by me).  So this year he painted his car like a pirate ship and wanted it to be a winning car.  I would have thought this agenda would have meant more time polishing his axels but ... nope.

He took first place in the siblings races.  He was so, so excited.

And Grady got third place in his age group.  He was so, so happy.  It was a great day.  There were kids in our den that didn't do as well.  And there was a lot of disappointment.  My kids were there last year so I understand how they felt.  It's such a hard tightrope ... being excited for my kids winning but not overdoing it.  All the kids handled it well but a lot of them left immediately.  Who can blame them.  But like we told our friend we drove home, you'll get them next year.

But it really does take effort.  You can't just throw together the car.  And you do have to make them polish the axels and align the wheels and the closer you are to 5oz the more wins you'll have.  These are all things we've learned in the two years we didn't win any heats at all.  And with two years of losses under their belts it was much easier to convince the boys to work on their cars.

But the real motivator?

Julia got a trophy last year.  And well ... she couldn't be the only one in the family with a trophy.  And if she could get one, so could they.

It was a good day.  Exhausting, but good.  I was glad it all came together well and I was so very glad it was over and off my plate.  Especially since I hadn't put it there and I was voluntold to do it.

At one point during the Derby, Lewis asked G to go thank his Den leader for helping him make such a fast car ... Why?  Mom did most of the helping.

We did make him thank his den leader, but it was nice to be acknowledged for my effort.