Pinewood Derby

Ronin's gotten older. It's hard to believe how old he actually is! Just yesterday it seemed he was a babe in arms. Now he's a wild sweaty boy racing cars at his first Pinewood Derby. 

 Well, I hate to expose a secret, but here is the car he DIDN'T make. Patrick was so annoyed at how difficult it was to build a car here. We have NO tools! We have NO supplies! We have NO space! I kept telling him to relax and just have Ronin do it. Even if it ended up being a block of painted wood. But of course he would have none of that. Even as frustrating as it was, Patrick stayed up night after night perfecting the thing. He got tools from little chinese corner shops trying to figure out what would cut. In the end it looked really nice. Patrick was very concerned that it look good because he remembers when his dad made his car and how happy he was as a boy, knowing his car was super cool and made by his dad. I thought it kind of defeated the purpose, but whatever. It got made, and I didn't have to do it! 

Here's the final touches. You can see who's really into it:

All the boys had a great time. Cache was excited to participate. I think he's secretly counting the days until he can be in it too. We don't have scouting with the church here so they do Activity Days for boys and this fell under that heading. They do a lot of scouting things through it. Basically we are just making do with what we have here and fortunately for us we have the best guy for the job. He was a scout master for years in the states, so he has blessed us all with his skills and concern for our boys. 

There he is, looking all old and cool and quite scruffy around the edges...

Someone else managed to get this amazing track from the American School. It was quite flashy and a lot of fun!