Pinewood Derby: The Real Deal

When I was in the seventh grade, I took shop class for the first time. Unbeknownst to me upon enrollment, one of the areas of study was a pinewood derby. Without any understanding of symmetry or drag or anything of the sort, I designed an orange hammerhead-shaped car that didn't place in any category, but I was really proud of that car.
So when it was time to buy kits for the Awana derby, I got really revved up thinking we'd be spending hours sanding, painting, meticulously placing stickers, and then shellacking them up to race at top speed. Or Dale would do it and I would snap pictures and enjoy the busyness of the project from afar.
But like a lot of things on my agenda, this little project got put on the back burner until the very last day. Oh, we had them cut at church so the kids all had their designs picked out and the shape in progress, but they were all just choppy blocks of wood sitting on dressers and in drawers.
The prior post was Wednesday, turn in day. We had to forgo that morning our academic responsibilities in order for the paint to be dry by afternoon so that we would be able to attach the stickers before 6:30: Go Time.
We spent part of the morning sanding and the rest of it painting, and somehow we managed to get them to the church on time without a sticky, paint-stained mess. Tre's car really got the raw deal. One of the guys that cut the block into a shape nicked the axle slot so that his wheels couldn't stay attached. Being a mother not lacking in ingenuity, I got out the hot glue gun and went to work fastening in that axle.

You can imagine my surprise when this happened. Tre's car is the brown, striped, half-painted one. They raced all the finalists on each lane because some of the lanes were milliseconds slower than the others. (You'd have thought we were at the Indy 500 the way some of these fellas were bantering over the right way to run the show.) But he won every race, on every lane, every time. It was pretty exciting.

He's still glowing from his victory... Look out universe, there's a new race car driver in town. Don't judge me for catching the man hanging his baby upside-down in the backgroud. I don't even KNOW that guy!