Derby Car Races

This is our first year participating in Boy Scouts with Little Man and Princess. Our Boy Scout troop allows siblings to participate but they can not win a medal. Saturday were their first participation in the Derby Car race and it has been quite an eye opening experience for me. I had no idea how serious this competition was and all the rules that go into it. As it was our first year I wasn't exactly sure what to expect and really not at all sure what to do at all.

First up was cutting out a Derby car, since my children are still young this was done by me. I used a band saw and cut a block of wood into a car shape. Both car were pretty much exactly the same. I have since learned there are tons of websites with Derby car patterns. I will keep this in mind next year.

Next, was trying to get the children to sand a car. This was a slow and long process. I don't think either child was able to really manage sanding the car for more than a few minutes, and it didn't help that the sand paper I had kept tearing. After a week of the children sanding, I did do a minor touch up on the sanding in order to get the cars ready for painting. But the bulk of the work was done by the children, after all this is a kids race, right. I saw no need to do any more of the work:)

Next up was painting the car. Again, the kids did all the work. They painted and decided to draw pictures on their cars. All in all I thought they were fine, and happy that the kids did the work.

Little Man drew the solar system on his car with the sun on the roof of the car. Princess drew Dragons on her car. I did tell the children they could use more than one color but they wanted solid colored cars:)


At Little Man's troop meeting the children assemble a Derby Car stand which was also painted and sanded. So the children could display their cars at home after the race.







After doing all this, which was a 3 week process, we were scheduled to take the cars in to be weighed and impounded the night before the race. This is were I ran into trouble. Just before leaving the house I got an email message from base saying there was a tanker spill and that traffic was backed up. Once hearing that I bundled up the kids and rushed them into the car, one hour before we were to be at check in! If you haven't lived in England, then you may not know that if there is a accident is can really, really mess up traffic. My husband who was out of town, had just called from the airport and I quickly relayed the problem and he gave me an alternate route to take, warning me that everyone will be taking this route. Staying positive and determine to get my children's cars checked in I headed off. After 90 minutes on the road we had made it to the next village 6 miles away:(! While struck in traffic I was frantically trying to reach the cub scout leader to see what would happened if we couldn't make it. Surely we would not be the only people not able to make it to base that night. Unfortunately there was no answer to the 6 or 7 phone calls I made, adding to my frustration.. My children were in the back of the car getting more and more upset that we were late for check in. Unfortunately the importance of check in was stressed a little too well at the Boy Scout meeting:( trying to keep calm and not lose my temper at the children because this was an important activity for them and they had worked hard, I tried every back road I could find and kept running into more and more traffic. After 90 minutes I called my husband on the cell phone, he had not boarded his plane yet. There wasn't a thing he could do but I needed to vent and be upset of someone (not the children) so I called him. My daughter and I wanted to turn around an go home, but my son was getting hysterical in the back seat at the thought of not making it to check in on time. My husband hearing the chaos in the car was sympathetic and thought the best action was to go home. Hence even more crying from the back seat:(. However my husband, who was on speaker phone, reassured my son that we would go to the Derby car race in morning and Daddy would make sure the children were able to run their cars. To my astonishment, upon hearing this my son stopped crying and agreed to go home. Later that night when talking about our disappointment of not making it to base my son annouced that Daddy would make Boy Scouts run his car no matter what. I told my husband this when he finally arrived that night and he was so proud that his son believed that somehow Daddy would fix it:).

Later that evening I got a call from the Boy Scout leader letting us know that there were several families unable to make it in and that we would still be able to participate in the race. Big relief but we needed to show up one hour before the race so we could weigh our cars and have them inspected. Crisis solved, WHEW!

Check in included:
Weigh your car -- could not weigh more than 5 oz.











Add weights to the car, we used coins.











A trial run down the track and a basic car inspection.








The kids had a great time at the races and can't wait to do it again next year even tho their cars were not the winners.

I am linking this post up to Lynda's


Also don't forget to link up all month to