Life: Meeting Expectations

Now onto more things that we do to keep ourselves occupied. I've posted a few pictures of Bryton's projects that have been assigned to him in the last few months. These are all things that are completely impossible for him to do alone so basically his school and scouts den are subtly giving these assignments to parents. I'm not complaining. (Yet. I'm going to save that for the end.) These are worth while projects. They're fun and good learning experiences. Definitely time consuming though.

The cake that you see up on top was for the annual Blue and Gold Banquet for scouts. Every boy is supposed to make a cake going along with whatever theme the leaders come up with. This year it was the "American Alphabet". Bryton was assigned the letter "D" so he had to come up with a patriotic cake that started with that letter. We decided to go with Declaration of Independence. Notice the blueberry topping with a "feather quill" spoon. We decided this year to go for taste because while the Hawaiian Luau cake we made 2 years ago was very cute and the rat cake we made last year was fun to make, both years we ended up taking practically the whole cake back home with us. This year we wrote the Declaration on cheesecake. I'm proud to say that it was the first to go.

On the bottom is the picture of his science experiment he did for school entitled "Wiiflexes". This was a winning situation for Bryton and Sydney because it meant that they had to play the Wii for 15 minutes 5 days a week. Normally they're only allowed to play it on weekends. The experiment was to see if playing the Wii actually improved hand/eye coordination. I was the control. I never played. He tested hand eye coordination by dropping a ruler between a person's thumb and forefinger and recording where that person caught it. As it turns out, I showed the least improvement so as far as this scientist is concerned, yes, it improves hand/eye coordination and is therefore a worthwhile waste of time.

The picture in the middle is of his pinewood derby car. Bryton decided he wanted to make a bowling pin. He did not win anything but that's not why he looks sad in the picture. He looks sad in the picture because he is posing and trying to pretend like he's concentrating on playing with his car.

I'm going to go out on a limb and admit to everyone that pinewood derby is something I just don't get. What's this obsession about? Is it really something that has to be done every single year? (Which to me actually seems like every few months.) Why not let them go out with a bang and have just the Webelos do it? Like a graduation from cub scouts celebration? Really, how many times can a boy stand to lose? More importantly, how many times can parents stand to watch their child lose? It gets old watching the same people win every single year. (I sound more bitter than I actually am.) This year, because John has been so busy and I don't have a clue how to make a pinewood derby car and because Bryton really seemed indifferent about the whole thing we initially decided to opt out of the derby. After all, hadn't John just spent 2 months in the fall coaching Bryton's Lego Robotics Team without the consumption of any alcohol? Because of that, we figured he should be granted clemency for at least a year from anything remotely stressful. We didn't realize that by making this decision we would automatically be inducted into the Parenting Loser's Hall of Fame. We started getting phone calls and emails and comments like, "You didn't do a derby car? How sad." I had to wonder who exactly it was sad for. Certainly none of us were sad about it. In fact we were feeling pretty ecstatic about our decision. Like a giant weight had been lifted from our shoulders. As luck would have it, we had a snow storm the night of the derby. Scout leaders started calling us. "Hey would it help you guys out if we were to cancel tonight and put it off for another week?" If we didn't care so much about what people think of us we would have told it like it is. "No, actually that would be doing the opposite of helping us." Instead we went along with it as though the heavens had been on our side. "Definitely. You can count us in."

You here people say all the time that it's just about having fun for them. They don't care if they win. It's just for the experience. Not so with me. If we're going to have a derby car then I want to win. Otherwise, what's the point? So I sat down in the basement the day of the derby polishing those axles over and over. Even though I pretty much knew from previous derbies what to expect, in the back of my mind I kept thinking, "Maybe. Just maybe." And then the visions of winning district started settling into my mind and I went back and polished those axles some more.

I'm glad to say that out of the 4 races that the bowling pin took part in it did come in first once. And that's all I have to say about it. Except this: to me, so not worth it. So, I guess it's a good thing it's not about me, isn't it?