the hubs made it to his dad's this afternoon. i'm so glad he stopped at a hotel last night. i really thought it was going to be a battle to get him to do this but he agreed w/ me. he has driven out there by himself and not stopped before. hell, we drove out there once that i know of and spent the night sleeping in a truck stop parking lot.
today we started work on the boy's pinewood derby car; the girl is making one too. for two hours this morning i was in a foreign country--the scout hut. it was me, one other mother and about 5 dad's w/ power tools. about three of the dads are the type who are so bound and determined to make their kids' cars the fastest that they barely let the boys work on their own cars. it's like they're trying desperately to either recapture something of their youth or use this small thing as a way to validate themselves. either way it makes me sad for their kids. in a way it's that friday night, small town football mentality. (dear lord i can't hold a train of thought tonight, it's all over the place.) those are the type of guys that had their glory days in high school. that's when they were the most "successful" in life and they have the same friends, run in the same crowds now but they're just plugging away at some 9-5 job because they didn't make it to the nfl or something. they're big in their hometowns but nonexistent elsewhere.
so we traced their designs onto their blocks of woods and one of the dads cut it out on some sort of saw. then the kids sanded, and sanded. i was waiting for instructions for the next step. the dads were huddling over one of the three saws diligently working on a car and talking about designs and how to make the cars go faster like it would solve all of the problems of the world. god, men are such strange animals. the next step, as was sincerely and earnestly explained to me by not one but two dads, is to sand the nails (aka axles) and wheels (they're plastic) because they all have little imperfections in them that will slow the car down. you have to get the ridges out of the nails and each wheel has a nub on it (that you practically need a microscope to see) because of how they're molded. there was talk about how to use some sort of dremmel/drimmel? tool to do this and other things i didn't understand. i decided at that point i'd taken the car as far as i could go and the hubs would have to pick up from there. i'm fairly certain the boy and the hubs did not do this step last year and i'm fairly certain they won't this year.
after that fun fest we went grocery shopping. came home put them away and i napped. then we went shopping for the paper/paints the girl needs for a school project (paint a sunset--why oh why couldn't this be my job for the week???) and then to the bro's for dinner.
the sil is starting to show : ) little puddin is making her presence known.
talked to the hubs again and he admitted it's weird being at his mom's house. well his dad's house; the one the wife/aunt has redecorated.
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