Girls Like Pinewood Derbies, Too!

Late April, 2016...one word: Whew!

While Nathan and Lorelai were in California at a jazz festival, Celeste, Aurora, and I had plenty to do. As I may have mentioned, we visited the Pima County Fair. We also had a Bunco night, a birthday party, an oil change, and a ward barbecue dinner. That's a lot of stuff right there. But there was one more event that encompassed the whole weekend, which was probably one of the more unique things our family has participated in...

...our daughter participated in a Pinewood Derby.

Now, you may think that the Pinewood Derby is an event reserved exclusively for Cub Scouts. In most cases, this is true. Every winter, my Facebook feed lights up with pictures of all my friends' sons, holding their little wooden cars in a church gym somewhere, and I smile and nod without really understanding what all the fuss is about. Since Nathan and I have no sons (and since we aren't super interested in scouting, anyway), the Pinewood Derby has always flown just outside our range of interest.

But this year, "somebody" (and by "somebody," I mean "our stake Primary presidency") thought, "Why should scouts have all the fun?" And lo and behold, a new stake Activity Days "Super Saturday" event was born! On Saturday, April 23, all the 8-12-year-old girls in the Sahuarita Stake were invited to the LDS Church building on Las Quintas Boulevard. For the entire morning, the girls would sit in on several workshops. Makeup and dance were two of them, but there was also a choir class and an archery class. And (drumroll please) there would be a Pinewood Derby as well!

The magnitude of this event didn't really register with me at first. The girls were told to collect their derby car kit and assemble their car a few weeks in advance. However, due to the stake's new boundary realignments, many girls fell behind schedule a bit in the confusion; we got our kits just a few days before the derby was to be held. We were informed we would be carving our cars at an Activity Day night with our previous ward (since they hadn't had time to assemble their cars either amid all the flurry of changes). So on Wednesday the 20th (the evening after Nathan and Lorelai left for California), the other girls and I happily reunited with our former ward for their car-making party.

Even though Lorelai wasn't there, I decided to order two car kits...I would make Lorelai's car for her, and she would have a toy to play with after the derby was over. This decision was made during my initial wave of naivete, when I assumed that Pinewood Derby cars were "toys"...I was soon disabused of this notion. Not by scouts, but by the many grown men that magically appeared at a girl's church Activity (where there is usually not a single solitary male adult to be found!).

It was weird to attend an Activity Days (which usually involves crafts, activities, and cute treats), and hear the whizzing of saws and smell freshly cut wood. The men were all hard at work carving the cars the girls designed, shaping their contours, and smoothing their edges with sandpaper. The girls were helping out too, of course, but they were getting a lot of assistance.

My friend Marshall was there, and when I was talking to him about the car, he mentioned I would need to add weights to the cars to increase their balance and speed. He could probably tell by the blank look on my face that my girls' cars needed more help than I could give them. He was kind enough to invite us over to his house the following evening to "pimp our rides." After Activity Days that night, we went home and painted the cars, so they would be ready for the tinkering the next day.

I was so relieved to have a Pinewood Derby "veteran" helping us out. Even though it was announced ahead of time that this would be a "hands off" derby, without the strict rules that governed the Cub Scouts' event, we all still wanted to have a respectable showing. Thankfully, this wasn't Marshall's first rodeo...he had a lot of bit & pieces in his big gear box that he used to deck out both our cars.

It was fun to watch him fiddle, glue, weigh, fiddle, test, drill, weigh, and fiddle some more. I thought we were stopping by for about 15 minutes. Instead, we spent over an hour and a half there. By this point, it had finally dawned on me...Pinewood Derby was much more than a game to Marshall and many other men like him. Well, it may have been a game to them when they were Boy Scouts themselves, but as adults, it was "serious business." It was a blood-sport that they were determined to win. Is it their engineer, "can-do", tinkering mindset? Is it more of an intramural athletic-style competitiveness? Or it is a blend of those two things? I may never know for sure.

With that "blood-sport" tone in mind, Celeste and I were more than willing for Marshall to deck our cars out with heavy metallic implements. True, we had painted them with old house-paint (they were a sunny yellow and a gentle purple), but we didn't mind making them look a little "Mad Max" as well!

Celeste was very happy with the final design; she had even carved a small "driver" for her car, that she "seat-belted" in with a rubber band! Her car was above the maximum weight for a standard Pinewood Derby car, but she was perfectly happy with it nonetheless. Lorelai's looked pretty awesome too; it was sleeker and looked a little more "dangerous" in my opinion! It looked a little more "Mad Max." Can you tell I am into "Mad Max"??

Anyway, just two days later, it was time for the "Super Saturday" event. Celeste and all the other girls were very proud to show off their cars!

 

As I said before, I've never been to a scout's Pinewood Derby, but I suspect their cars look pretty different than most of the cars I saw that day. There were lots of sparkles, stickers, jewelry, and even a feathered boa atop one car (as it turned out, the boa did not increase air drag on that racer). My Little Pony figurines and LEGO minifigs sat atop many of the cars as "riders." One car was designed to look like a flip-flop; another like a violin; still another like a submarine! I doubt most of them were "regulation," but they were all so creative that no one minded much.

 

The actual racing and timing was conducted pretty much the same way it was during the Cub Scout events. Here are Celeste's two runs (the girls raced in age divisions)

Just for fun, we also raced Lorelai's car against those of the other 10-year-old girls present. As it turned out, Marshall had done a pretty good job on her car; it was one of the fastest ones in that age group! I felt a little guilty for entering it after that. However, Lorelai's runs were disqualified on account of her not being present, so the girls who made it were able to savor their victory.

Celeste's car fell somewhere in the middle of the 8-year-old pack, which disappointed her initially...she'd beaten her "track-mate" and thus perceived her time as being somewhat faster than it was. However, being the good sport she is, her frustration soon turned to joy when her friend Alissa got the fastest times!

Since the derby wasn't competitive (at least on paper...there were some emotionally invested parents present, though!), all the girls competing got a cute ribbon and a pat on the back. Most of them were very happy to have participated, and didn't care too much about their scores one way or the other. After all, there were plenty of other workshops to visit as well!

Celeste had a great time at the archery station...even if she never quite got the hang of handling her bow. In fairness, archery can be a tricky sport; I'm still too wimpy to try it out, in fact! But even if her arrows never found the target, she was still quite happy to be trying it out.

Celeste also enjoyed the dancing station, and the makeup station (of course). She also had fun singing at the choir. Then, when the activity was all over, all the girls gathered together in the gym of the church once more to sing together the song they'd learned in choir!

Overall, it was a really clever, ambitious, fun activity and I am so glad our stake Primary leaders put it together and ran it! I sincerely hope this is an activity that will be repeated each year (hopefully next year it will be on a weekend when Lorelai won't be out of town!). Best of all, the girls' reaction to their Pinewood Derby was almost universally positive, so it will in all likelihood be back next year.

I don't care much for Boy Scouts, but for some reason I am very happy my girls had a chance to participate in a Pinewood Derby (unorthodox as it was). It was a really cool idea to take an event that has meant so much to so many families and make it just as exciting for the daughters as for the sons. Why should boys have all the fun, anyway? There are plenty of great scout activities out there I'm sure the girls would love to participate in, if they were given the chance. Now, a Pinewood Derby for girls is a reality, and I think that's great! Although I still do find it very amusing how competitive many participants get. Still, there's nothing that says girls can't fuel their competitive fires as well.

The nerd in me wants to encourage my daughters to go full-on Mad Max Fury Road with their cars next year. Maybe we can make them look something like these babies:

 

Or, you know...we could paint flowers and rainbows on them. No big deal. It is their derby, after all.