Quintuplet Dad

This is a blog for Jayson Wilkinson, father to the Wilkinson Quints (as well as Riley and Kaiya).

Friday, April 24, 2009

The pinewood derby

I know that it is weird for me to post so soon after the last post but something interesting happened today. Today was the pinewood derby for cub scouts and it was Riley's first pinewood derby too. For anyone that doesn't know what that is, the cub scouts and their mom or dad make a car out of a block of pine wood and race them. Ideally, it would be really nice if the boys made their own cars by themselves but the reality is that making a decent car requires power tools and a bit of know-how...which means the dad pretty much does everything but sand the car.

Well, I was pretty nervous for this because there is a lot of pressure. You see, Rachelle's dad and her uncle John all were big winners of the pinewood derby (which means their boys all won the pinewood derby) in both design and speed. In order to be considered an official part of the "club", I felt like I needed to do something special.

Fortunately, Riley had a good idea. He wanted to make the Batmobile and I thought that would be pretty fun so we did it. Here are a few pictures of how it turned out.

Before painting and adding in the nozzle

After painting and adding in the nozzle:



Back view (where the weight is).


On the night of the race, I wasn't sure how it would go because I hadn't really run it on anything and wasn't totally sure that it would go straight. To make a long story short, it went straight and I feel like I can be part of the club now. He won both the design and the speed portion.




Now I just have to manage expectations for the next year because I don't want him to start thinking he will always win. He was doing pretty well I think. He went up to every kid after just about every race and told them how good of a job each of them had done. I was really proud of him for doing that but I told him afterwords that I wanted to make sure that he also did it when he lost. I think he will.

4 Comments:

  • At April 24, 2009 10:25 PM , Blogger McKay said...

    You shouldn't have felt that much pressure, Jayson: my Dad didn't figure out how to make winning pinewood derby cars until after I had left cub scouts.

    I lost every pinewood derby, and I had to watch every one of my younger brothers win everything. In fact, the last year I was in cub scouts, Colby was in cub scouts too. He ended up beating me to take third place and went to some regional competition.

    I had plenty of opportunities to be a good loser. (It didn't help. I'm still a sore loser. That's why I am still whining about losing my cub scout pinewood derby.)

     
  • At April 28, 2009 10:00 AM , Blogger Megan Of Parker said...

    The awesomeness of that car blows my mind. Congratulations! it makes me so happy our family is artistically inclined.

     
  • At April 28, 2009 2:13 PM , Blogger Crazy Granny said...

    Jayson you are an awesome Dad!

     
  • At May 4, 2009 9:26 PM , Blogger My Boaz's Ruth said...

    I was never part of cub scouts (being a girl and all) but my dad had made a track for the church so we had a church wide one and although my dad helped, I'll let you know that a kid can do quite a bit on their own cars (including painting, gluing together pieces, choosing nuts to weigh it down and stacking them in appropriate places, etc.). So it shouldn't be that the kid just does the sanding.

     

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