Pinewood Derby

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Ethan had his second pinewood derby today. He made his car look like Lightning McQueen from the Disney movie “Cars”. It turned out to be a really cool looking car, but it didn’t do very well in the races.

First of all we got to the church and he weighed in his car. It was really light, but he said he didn’t want to add any weights to it, so next we just waited for the races to start. Right before they started the races, someone made a comment about putting graphite on the wheels/axles, and Kyle decided to run over to the table and do that really fast before Ethan’s car was up. Ethan’s name came up, and he put his car on the track all excited to see it go, and then it didn’t even make it to the finish line. It rolled down the ramp and then stopped dead on the straight part of the track. Ethan sat there crushed, just staring at it as people told him to just push it through, so the timer for his car would stop counting. Kyle and another dad saw how upset he was and went to help him fix it up a bit to hopefully help the car make it to the end of the track next time. The second time his car was up, it again didn’t make it to the end of the track. Kyle asked the cubmaster if they could add some weight to the car hoping that that may make a difference, and they got permission to do so. And they continued to graphite the wheels after each race. I noticed that with each time his car went down the track the time was better and better, but the damage was done.

They way that the race works is, each boy’s car gets to race 6 times, twice down each of the three lanes. They take the slowest time, and throw that one out, then they add up all the rest of the times. Then they rank the cars based on that number. Well this year instead of just going through the whole pack and starting with boy number 20 and working their way up to the top three, they announced the places within the ranks. So they announced the order that the cars came in for the wolf den, then the bear den and finally the webelos. Ethan came in last of all the bears, and you could tell that he was really disappointed. Then they proceeded to announce the top three overall winners. After that was all done and we were having refreshments and the boys were sending their cars down the track just for fun, they had up on the screen the scores of all the boys in the pack. Ethan’s car was dead last, and Ethan saw it. He was in such a grouchy mood for the rest of the day. But Kyle told him that we would go to the scout shop and buy some more kits and practice making cars between now and the next derby so that hopefully, next year’s race will be better. 🙂

February

Well February has come and gone, and we didn’t have too many exciting things happen, although we were very busy. Every day seems to be packed with something. I’ve got girl scout meetings once a week, I babysit three days a week, Ethan has cub scouts once a week and Kyle has been subbing for one or the other leader every single week since Ethan became a bear in January. Dinah and one of the little girls that I babysit have preschool twice a week. Jeremy is in Kindergarten every morning until noon. Ethan and Tyra are in school all day, and of course Kyle goes to work every day. And this is just all the regular stuff that keeps us busy!

Ethan’s pack meeting for this month was the Blue and Gold Banquet on the 8th. They decided to have a fiesta this year and we had taco salads for dinner. They awarded the boys that had earned awards recently. Ethan hasn’t earned anything new yet, considering he JUST moved up to bears and hasn’t worked his way very far into the book. They gave gifts of appreciation to leaders that have been released. There were some skits performed and after all the eating was done, they let the boys pick either a sombrero or maraca to take home. We finished the night off with a pinata, which the scouts got to take turns whacking at. First they let the kids in the wolf den beat at it, and then the kids in the bear den. I think it busted before they got through all the bears though. I was kind of bugged that the pack meeting is supposed to be a family thing, and yet only the scouts got to hit at the pinata, while the siblings stood back and watched, hoping that they would get some of the booty.

On the 10th, Tyra’s class invited family to come to the school during school hours to come check out all the animal reports that the kids had put together. I always go to these things and see all the other projects and wonder if all the kids really did their projects all on their own. Some of them are always way too good to be the work of the child alone, that’s for sure. Tyra chose to study and do her report on foxes. This also fell on pajama day so all the kids were wearing their pjs. I let Dinah and Chloe wear their pajamas to school as well. I didn’t get to stay very long to look at many of the other projects however, for as soon as we got there and we were looking at Tyra’s project, I discovered that Chloe had a dirty diaper. Such bad timing. Also Dinah ran off, and then Chloe kept trying to sit on Tyra’s lap. Chloe also decided that since we were no longer traveling outside that that meant she could take off her shoes. I tried to get her off of Tyra’s lap and get her shoes back on which resulted in Chloe throwing a huge fit, crying loudly. I felt bad for the mom next to me that was trying to video tape her daughter telling her about her animal project. So I told Tyra she did a good job on her project and took Dinah, Chloe and Lydia back home!

Something else that happened this month, most people will probably think I’m silly for mentioning. I had a dental checkup, my regular cleaning and exam on the 24th. The thing that was different about this one was that when the dentist was done looking at my x-rays and my teeth, he seemed really surprised, and asked if this was a first. “A first what?”, I wondered. Then he said that I have no new cavities! I’m sure that to some people that’s no big deal, but for me that was the first time in YEARS that I haven’t had new problems when I went in for a checkup. Usually I have one or two cavities that need filling. At least once a year for the last couple of years I’ve needed a new crown (I’m up to NINE crowns in my mouth!)…just something new every time I go in. Now this doesn’t mean that none of my teeth have problems this time, just that there were no NEW problems to have to deal with. My 3 wisdom teeth that are showing all have cavities, but the dentist doesn’t want to bother filling them because I need to have them pulled anyway. One of those three cavities is more like a huge cave on the back of my tooth. But I already knew about the wisdom teeth issues (I’ve totally been avoiding going in to have them pulled), but am SO excited that there were no new problems. 🙂

And the last exciting thing worth mentioning, is that as the girl scout troop leader with a large van, I got to go up to Salt Lake City to pick up our troop’s girl scout cookies! I really wish that I had been able to take a picture of our stack of cookies, but our camera hasn’t been working properly lately. Our troop had two pallets of cookies, and almost filled my van (which we had taken the seats out of, to make more room). I was really excited to get to see how they distribute cookies to each troop. We did annoy some people from another troop that were waiting for us to get out of their way so they could start loading their cookies. But I promise we weren’t trying to annoy anybody. We had loaded the first pallet of cookies into the van and then looked up to find the rest of our cookies, but they were nowhere to be seen. We stood there and waited a few minutes to see if they would show up on the dock when one of the other pallets was moved out of the way, but they didn’t. So Amy (our troop’s cookie mom) went to go ask about it. It turns out that our other pallet of cookies was just sitting in the back of the warehouse all by itself totally unnoticed by anyone. So we brought it to the attention of the guys operating the fork lifts and they brought it to the dock for us. And now we have the fun joy of delivering all those cookies!

Ethan’s 9th Birthday

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We celebrated Ethan’s birthday a couple of days late this year. We had our Girl Scout troops investiture and rededication meeting on his birthday. I know, I’m the troop leader and it was bad of me to schedule something on his birthday, but we did have it scheduled for Saturday and not everybody could come so we adjusted it.

So at nine years old he is in the third grade. He finds the work too easy, and is quite bored most of the time. He almost never practices his spelling words and will usually miss only one or two (just think if he actually practiced he wouldn’t miss any!). He doesn’t do his homework but always does well on the tests in school, so it’s obvious that he knows his stuff (takes after his daddy, Kyle was just like that too, drove his teachers nuts…). Ethan is totally into legos, and that’s usually what he’s messing with when he’s supposed to be doing homework. He is also in cub scouts and now that he’s nine, that means that my little wolf has moved up to bears:

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Tooth fairy’s last visit for 2011 and first for 2012

The tooth fairy made her last visit for 2011 to come and collect Ethan’s tooth on Dec 31.

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And now, one week later has to come make her first visit of 2012 considering Tyra lost a tooth too. Ironically they both lost the tooth from the same spot, the one just to the right of their two front teeth. Unfortunately I failed to get a picture of Tyra with the new hole in her mouth.