29 January 2011

Eat Mason's dust


Mason displays his winning Pinewood Derby car and his first-place certificate

Today was Mason's last Pinewood Derby. Since we missed last year's Pinewood Derby, we decided to go all out. OK, I decided to go all out. I may have been a tad obsessive with my wheel and axle preparation. Mason, of course, did the design. It looks remarkably similar to the design of the last car—close enough that Teressa kept asking if there wasn't something else that Mason wanted to do to make it different. There wasn't. He wasn't interested in any elaborate decorations, either. All he wanted was the spoiler in back and the lightning bolts on the sides. Perhaps I spent more time that I should have on my part than I should have. Between the seven-step buffing process for the axles and the time I spent on applying graphite, I spent many hours on the project. After all the work, Mason was feeling pretty confident. I made sure to warn him that other families had done a lot of work on their cars, too.

Maybe they didn't do quite as much work as we did, though, because Mason took home the top prize. He won every heat he participated in and had the record time for the track. I think Mason was pretty excited about the results. (I have some video of Mason's reaction to the final race as proof. I may have to post it later after I load it on the computer.)

18 January 2011

The Wright Brothers


The boys pose with the airplane model that Grandpa made for them

This Halloween, the older boys decided they wanted to dress up as the Wright brothers. Sam wanted to be a dog. That worked out well because the Wright brothers had a dog named Cisco. When Grandpa and Grandma Scott came to visit right before Halloween, Grandpa built a replica of the Wright brothers' plane. He built it out of a discarded grocery cart. It was a rather sizable replica so fortunately, it could be dismantled. Otherwise, Teressa might not have had room to park the van in the garage.


Emotions during the photo shoot ran the gamut

Since I happened to be stuck in Iraq during the Halloween season, I didn't have the opportunity to photograph the boys in their costumes. So we pulled everything back out this week and finally got those photographs. I had forgotten just how challenging trying to photograph three boys can be. We finally got some good photos, but it took a while.