Ethan had his first pinewood derby tonight! We’ve spent the past few weeks thinking about how to make his car and he didn’t like any of my ideas. He had his heart set on making a bat-mobile (Kyle recently bought the lego Batman game and since then Batman has been Ethan’s new obsession). I honestly didn’t know how we could pull off a bat-mobile but in the end we just handed Ethan the hack saw and said ‘go to it’. He ended up cutting it out mostly by himself (Kyle did help a little after Ethan had given it a good try), he sanded it down and painted it. Then he cut out a Batman symbol and some windows that he drew and glued them to the car, he even put wings on the back. Kyle helped with putting the wheels on and it was set to go.
We got to the church early so his car could be weighed in and it was a bit under weight so they gave him some weights to put on it if he chose (which he did, so he stuck them on the underside of the car). Then we watched them set up the track, they explained how things would work and the racing began. Each boy’s car went down the track 6 times, their slowest speed was thrown out and the 5 other speeds were totaled up to get each boy’s final score.
I think Ethan’s car did pretty well. In the end looking at all the boys final scores they were really competitive. I mean one hundredth of a second faster and you could have moved up by one place, they were really close. Ethan ended up placing 17th out of 22 boys. Not bad, and I am glad to report that he wasn’t as upset as I was expecting him to be. He had a good time, and now we have a better idea of what to expect for next year. And I’m really glad that I can say my son made his car by himself (with only minimal help) and he wasn’t one of the boys who had their dad make it for him! 😉
