The Kid Who Won the Derby

Newsletter 2022-01-24

The Pinewood Derby only comes once a year, and for good reason. Any more than that and families wouldn’t survive. With parent-child projects, patience is always stretched thin, and frayed tempers and power tools don’t mix. That’s why I avoided tools altogether and outsourced the woodworking portion of this woodworking project to “real” men. I handled the equally important decoration phase. We ended up with a rainbow RV, an every-color boat that became a mostly-black goth barge, and a speed racer that wasn’t supposed to look anything like a wedge of cheese but still kind of did. My main job, besides making sure the kids painted the cars and not each other, was to put on the wheels, a simple task that was impossible to screw up. I messed it up royally. I vaguely remembered from my own childhood that it was hard to fit the wheels into the pre-cut slots, and that memory proved accurate. The wheels I put on my kids cars went in every direction but straight. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter ho…