Pinewood Derby 2009

A few months ago, we began our families first experience with Cub Scout's Pinewood Derby. Nick's grandpa was here and the kids LOVED working with him on sanding, painting, and adding weight to their cars. I never knew that there existed "regulations" for pinewood derby cars, so this was our first "official" experience.

Step 1: Cutting off excess wood/shaping the car. This was done by our Cub Master at his house the day before.

Step 2: Sanding the car

Nice shades, Nick!

Step 3: Painting the car Step 4: Attaching the wheels Step 5: Weighing the car and figuring out how much more/less weight it needs.

Thanks to our friends/neighbors for the use of their tiny scale. Step 6: Drilling holes to put the tiny metal balls of weight in (see bottom of car).

Step 7: Tightening wheels and putting graphite on the axels (graphite is very messy, if you haven't used it before: do it outside)

Here's all 3 cars, Ted's old one that his dad re-worked, Maddie's eyeball car, and Nick's shark car.

Now we watch the races and see how our cars do. Out of maybe 15 cars, Nick's came in 4th place for time. He was psyched!

The track was huge and there were signs everywhere and black & white checkered flags, it was really a fun night.

Maddie's eyeball car...

Our three cars raced each other--Nick's won.

The Three Buckwalter Boys: Nick, Ted, and "Bompa" Jim.

What made the weekend so special was having grandpa there to work with the kids--he enjoyed it very much and took all the regulations very seriously, which made the kids even more excited about the preparations and the race. We're so lucky he was here!!!

Scrabbling round together

When Ted's dad comes to town we always play scrabble.

So last May when he was here for Nick's baptism, we got out the tiles (on our new rotating board--with little tiny walls to keep the tiles from sliding around--yes, we LOVE it!)

This board below represents a later game between solely Nick and his grandpa, in the which we got a bit lenient on word definitions (and even existences of such words) for the sake of Nick's young age and Bompa's urge for points, I imagine :) It was fun to hear them debate and wonder about adding word endings, like: "men" to the word "veil"...hmmm

Nick was quite proud and took this photo to remember their game by.