Duncan wins again and gets his Bear!

Our combined Cub Scout packs held their annual pine wood derby this week. We are happy to announce that Duncan took first place again! The races were a lot closer this year. There were a couple times Duncan's car, Light Speedy, came up at the end of the race to win. It was a fun night. In addition to the pinewood derby, it was also the pack's Blue and Gold dinner. Duncan earned his Bear award, and a few belt loops. He did his Bear in 3 months! That's pretty fast, but he worked really hard at it. He set a goal, we gave him an incentive (a new DS game), and off he went. Now we can spend the remainder of the year working on extra awards and activities. Here are a few video clips of the races...

Scouted 4 Food

Last Saturday, Duncan (and I) participated in something called, "Scouting 4 Food". It's a food drive. Between the hours of 8am and 4pm, scouts all over the area were in front of stores asking people to buy a couple extra items, and donate them to the food drive. The cub scout pack Duncan is in, volunteered to collect food from 8am-10am in front of a Stater Bros. They did awesome. They filled the equivalent of about 6 blue bins!

Here's Duncan with a fellow Wolf as they began their service.



A shot of Duncan working his charm on shoppers entering the store.

Once the cub pack was done at 10am, I needed to go to the Abertsons where the Boy Scout Troop was doing the same thing from 8am-12noon, to see how they were doing. Duncan was a bit tired, but decided to stay since only ONE scout showed up (I was a little unhappy about that).

I was very proud of Duncan. He was a little shy in the beginning, but the more he did it, the more confident he got. He did have some rejections, and those did weaken his confidence, but he had more successes than rejections. The cub scout motto is "Do Your Best", and Duncan certainly did that. Scouting is fun.

Friday Flashback 10.01.10

Hey, look at me... I'm blogging!

Today's flash back photo comes from all the way back to April 28, 2010! Wait, what? That's not that long ago...



Duncan getting some awards he had earned, at the pack meeting in April.

Well, it turns out, that was the last day we took any pictures with the new camera I gave Anna six months previous, in October of 09. Why was it the last picture? Very soon after this picture was taken, the camera got washed in the laundry! We tried the "rice" method of drying out the camera, but it never worked again. We've been using our old camera ever since.

A few weeks ago, I found a deal online for a camera that was very close to the one we washed, and I bought it! It's a slightly nicer model that the one before. It's a Sony DSC-w330. what it enables us to do, is see those pictures that are on the memory card of the last camera. Luckily, the memory card was fine after it's washing. So, yeah. It's nice to have a nice camera once again.

CIEC's BSA's 100th Birthday Party Event

This last weekend, Duncan and I went to our council's BSA's 100th Birthday Event with the scouts in our ward. We left in the late afternoon on Friday to go to Glen Helen park, where the event would take place.

Once we found our campsite, we set up our tent. Once nighttime was upon us, we popped popcorn, and did some planning before it was time to turn in. Poor Duncan fell asleep in his camping chair while waiting for me to finish talking to some other scout leaders. He must have slept fine once I got him in his sleeping bag, because he was excited and ready for the day!

After having breakfast burritos for breakfast, Duncan got his uniform on, and was ready to go!


Here is a picture of just a small number of the scouts and people that were there for this event. This was taken while we waited for the opening ceremony to start.

The first thing we participated in was an attempt to break a world record for the world's largest marbles tournament. I think they had about 840 participants for this tournament. All who participated got a patch. The marble game they played was called Warstone. (They played a very simplified version.)

After the marble tournament, we made our way to the world record attempt at the longest pinewood derby track. It was advertised as being 250 feet long. But apparently, other groups were attempting to break the old record, too. So the people in charge of ours went to 510 feet! That is over 100 feet longer than the next closest attempt. We were excited to run our cars on that track. Here's a shot of our cars with many of the other ones waiting too.

Once we entered our cars, there was a looooong (that should have about 20 "o"s) wait. They ran council finals with the regulation track. There were 18 cars in 18 heats. Then they went on to the long track, to get it ready. The timing equipment would not cooperate, and they tried to get it going for WAY too long. We were probably there for about 3 hours before they started putting cars down the track. Then is took about an hour for them to get to our cars, which happen to be near the end.

While we were waiting, there were some cub scouts that found some snails, and they were playing with them. Duncan showed an interest in the snails and they gave him one of them to play with. Here's Duncan sitting in the shade of the water cooler, with the snail.

Here's a shot from near the top of the track, down to the finish line. That's Duncan near the middle.

Finally, Duncan's and Anna's cars are up and ready to go... (I had to move the weights to the tops of the cars because there wasn't enough clearance underneath.)

... and they're off... Unfortunately, both cars did not make it to the finish line. The axles were a little loose on both cars. I tried securing them in the wood as best I could, but they loosened up while on the run, and the tires rubbed on the sides of the cars too much, and caused them to stop. Such a bummer to wait that long, only to have them go about half way. But they still ran on the world's longest track!

There's my car finally up and ready to go! It did make it all the way down, but only clocked an average time.

Duncan was pretty sad that his car didn't go the whole way down. But one thing that helped him get his smile back, was everyone, and I mean EVERYONE that saw his Wii car, REALLY liked it. All the scouts thought it was awesome. Duncan was pretty proud of that.

After spending way too much time at the pinewood track, we found some other fun things to do. Here's Duncan on an obstacle course. He raced against a boy in my troop named Paul.

There's he is "leaping" through the course, just a second behind Paul... They ended up finishing in a tie!

We looked around for more stuff. This was called "scouts hiking".

This was called "goofy golf". There were 6 holes. They hit the softballs with those clubs, till they got in the holes. It was open field miniature golf, and the scouts really liked it.

Duncan putting a puzzle together. His puzzle had a picture of merit badges.

We did a few other fun things, and even made time to have some snow cones. Here we are after a long day of activities and dinner (and pudding cups)! After this, we took that tent down, cleaned up our campsite, and went to the closing ceremony.

There were some cool things at the closing ceremony, but there were some others that took too long. There was a local band that played for about 45 minutes. Their music was pretty good, but I think they should have been at the end. Duncan tried to stay awake, but eventually fell asleep.

All in all, it was a really fun day. We were glad we did the things we did. Duncan had a great time. I hope this event is something he'll remember for a long time. I hope he remembers he celebrated the BSA's 100th anniversary. Scouting is fun stuff.

Duncan stuff

Before we left on our vacation, there were a few things that Duncan did that I didn't have time to share here on the good ol' blog.

I'll go ahead and do some of that now...


Here's Duncan with the boys in his Wolf den preforming a skit during pack meeting.



Here he is receiving some of the things he's been working on- some ribbons for his BSA 100th Anniversary patch, and the "marbles" belt loop. We're working to get his "Wolf" rank finished up in time for the next pack meeting in Sept.

One of the last things Duncan had to do before the end of the track (or was it 2nd grade?), was a big solar system project. He had to create a model. Anna was all over this project with him. The kit they bought was very basic... it only had the planets! (Go figure.) So Anna bought a bunch of other styrofoam balls and skewers so Duncan could also make the asteroid belts. This is what it looked like when it was done.

Duncan was very happy with his project, as was his teacher. Anna too.

So yeah, those were the things Duncan had going on before our family trip/summer vacation.

Pinewood Derby!

Yesterday was the combined ward Pack Pinewood Derby. The quick ending is- Duncan's car won 1st place!


Duncan decided to make his car look like a Wii remote. When I was working with him on choosing a design, we looked online at many cars and saw one as a Wii remote. Once he saw it, he wanted to make one too. Duncan did about an hour's worth of sanding. He got a little bit of help cutting the small pieces. Anna and I spray painted it white. Duncan painted the details. We put a bunch of layers of clear-coat on it to give it a nice glossy finish. I put the wheels on it.


Most of the action was caught on video, and I have clips of the races at the end of the post.


Here's a group shot of all the cub scouts and Webelos that participated. Everyone got a ribbon for participating. The first, second, and third place finishers got a medal.

Duncan was also part of the opening and closing flag ceremonies, and was assigned the U.S. flag.

I'm not sure how long that track is, but I want to say I've heard someone else say it was about 70 feet(?).

Afterward, Anna took the kids to get ice cream to celebrate Duncan's victory. (I left to go to a Wood Badge beading that same night.)

Here's the first race.

Here's the second official race. The race just before this, Duncan's car had jumped the lane it was on, so they did the race over again.

I believe there were a couple more races to determine the winner. Duncan's car was undefeated!

Duncan's car was the most "finished". I overheard one of the other newer parents saying they didn't know about weighting the cars, etc. Might make for some more exciting races next year.

We might also look into entering some district pinewood derbies. I'll have to find out when they are.

Anyway, good times!

getting caught up

I've been really busy the past month or so with scout duties and goals, and also with just trying to keep up with all the things life brings. Those things have kept me from putting up posts to the blog that aren't of a "weekly" nature. But I have some time right now, so here we go with getting caught up...


In January, our leaky faucet finally annoyed us enough, that I had to do something about it. Instead of changing out the stem in our old faucet, I decided I wanted a different faucet. I didn't like the old one. So I picked one up from Home Depot that was similar, but had better handles. I didn't realise till installing it, that it was plastic, and the tip rotated (which didn't work too well with our faucet-tip-mounted water filter). So after about a week, we had had enough of the new plastic faucet, so I took it back (still had the box), and bought a much nicer fixture set. I also bought and installed an under the sink water filtration system. I spent a lot of time underneath the sink that day.


Here are the new fixtures. From left to right- soap dispenser, faucet, water control, filtered water faucet.

the filtration canisters.

Liam had his two front teeth loose at the same time. But the one that was loosest got the most attention, and it wasn't long until it seemed like it was barely hanging in there. One night, as Liam was showing me how loose the tooth was, I told him to grip it tight, and pull it out. I don't think he thought it would actually come out, but... out it came! He was so surprised! That's his third tooth, and they were all pulled out by himself. 3 for 3!

Duncan received his Bobcat rank at the "Blue and Gold" dinner and Pack Meeting a few weeks ago. He also earned a soccer belt-loop (something he wears on his belt). He looks quite spiffy in his uniform. That night he also led the gathering in reciting the Cub Scout Promise and the Cub Scout Law.

I can't remember if it's been a week yet, but Liam's other tooth came out. As soon as the first of the front two teeth was out, he began to constantly work on the second tooth. It didn't take long for it to be quite loose, and get the "let's pull it out" attention. I tried having Liam pull it out himself, but I don't think he was trying too hard. Anna convinced him to let her lasso it. He was pretty nervous, but trusting. One tug... and that's all it took, the tooth was out! It bled just a tiny bit, but it made Liam pretty upset. He got over it quickly. His adult teeth are already visable, so it won't be long till they're in.

Duncan and I worked on some more of his cub scouting requirements. One of them was to stand 10 steps apart and throw the ball back and forth till Duncan could throw and catch. The catching was the harder part, but after about 20 minutes or so, he was getting much better at it. He actually has a pretty decent throw.

Jennan was very inspired by playing catch, and got her glove and ball to join us. Then, we got Tegan a glove and the girls had a great time playing "catch" too. Pretty much every day since then, Jennan has gotten her glove and ball and asks to go outside to play catch.

There you have it. All the stuff I've been holding out on. Good times.