It's another rainy Saturday in the litany of rainy weekends we've had here this year. I'm not really complaining. I understand drought pretty well. I know how much we desperately need the rain. And I need to be decorating a cake for tomorrow anyway. Daddy and Smunch left an hour ago for the San Francisco Giants FanFest, which doesn't start for another half hour. It's raining there too, but I hope it's some good bonding time for them.We were supposed to find out yesterday whether Smunch made the competitive baseball team. We haven't heard a thing yet and I'm kinda bummed about that. It makes me unnecessarily nervous. I mean really, if he doesn't make it, I'm off the hook for a lot of extra work this Spring. But he'll be so disappointed...
Anyway, I hadn't quite finished up yakking about last weekend when we all endured another Pinewood Derby. Not only were Aunt Karen and SPENCER! there, but Gram and Grandpa joined us as well. They joined us far too early. I hadn't anticipated the whole weighing in and registering to take a full hour or more. We were all pretty bored, but at least SPENCER! had some good company.
This year, Daddy took a different approach to creating a Pinewood Derby car with his son. Last year, they agonized over the details, made it look really cool and in the end, it ran two races and didn't do well enough to run in any more of them. This time, Daddy left most of the carving and decorating up to Smunch...with supervision, of course. When it needed a little more weight, they hammered nails into the back end. Not pretty, but quite effective.Smunch's den was in charge of the "flag ceremony" for this event and it was cute to see them marching down the room with the flag and leading the pledge of allegiance (even though I half-despise this ceremony).
And Smunch looked excited to be doing it. He managed to keep from mopping the floor with the national emblem. It all went pretty well!
And finally, the races began...43 heats of races and that was just for the scouts. There were also divisions for siblings and parents!
Smunch's car is in the photo above, next to the one being set on the track. It did really well and placed first in two races, second in one and third in one. The car's time, however, was best in the race where it placed third...suggesting that it wasn't really all that fast, but Smunch was thrilled watching it go. It was more fun to watch him than to watch the race.
In the end, his car wasn't in the top three for his age group, but it was probably in the top 5 of about 13 cars. He was happy, so we were all happy. Much better than the meltdown of last year!
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