Championship Style

At 5:45 this morning, Steve and Kaylee literally physically hauled me out of bed against my will. Usually I can get up fine when I need to any more, but the 3 hours of sleep I got the night before had piled up on me and I was well in the middle of "catching up" as far as my body was concerned. I was so exhausted that it felt like I had cotton in my head. But we were in the Jeep and driving our way up to South Bend by 6:30 a.m. I thought about flying, but it's one of those situations that doesn't work well for flying. It's an hour and 40 minute drive (and WHO decided we had to be in S. Bend by 8-9 a.m.?!) and it's only a 35-40 minute flight. No problem, right? Except that whole driving to the airport on both ends thing and having to get a car there adds almost as much time and more hassle than just driving that distance in the first place. So I drove while watching my second sunrise in two days.

When we arrived at the church in S. Bend that was hosting the State Finals for the Awanas Pinewod Derby Races, we weighed her car, registered it, sent it off for judging, then stopped up at the cafeteria upstairs and had a little breakfast before the festivities began. Judging was first, and they announced the winners for "original" and "traditional" car designs. Kaylee won third place in "original" design! Then the races began. The leaders went first, and then came the 3rd and 4th grade girls. Now that's fortuitous, because once your bracket is done, they hand out awards and you can go home and don't have to wait through the entire roster. That wasn't great planning on their part-they should have done it like Bible Baptist and handed out awards at the end so we all had to stay there and watch everyone the whole time, but personally I was grateful!

The track was huge-a big tall thing with a big hill and then a long straightaway. We were half hoping that Kaylee's car would just make it all the way to the end without getting hung up. See, we knew the majority of the people there had taken this thing very seriously, using liquid spray-on lubricant on the wheels, all sorts of stuff. The fact we made it to "state" at all kind of surprised us, but we didn't do much of anything to prepare for the day--just add a bit more graphite and throw the car in a plastic bag and show up. There were cars that did not in fact make it all the way down the track without getting hung up...but Kaylee's was not one of them. The bracket of kids going sit on the stage in chairs waiting for their turn to put the cars on the top of their assigned lane on the track, there are six lanes and each kid gets to race once in every lane; the kids run to the end of the track and sit in the chairs to await the results, the cars are released, and a digital display at the bottom puts the cars in order of placement, with a computerized display stating who came in what place and with what time, down to the thousandths of a second. This is displayed on about four large screens around the auditorium with the kids' names, placement and times. The kids then pick up their cars and run back up to the stage to wait for the next heat.

Kaylee's car won first place on one or two (she insists two) heats, and came in second place the rest of the time. Of course with a large group you may not race against the fastest car, so it goes by time, not "placement" every race per se. Her car was in 4th place for awhile, dipped to 5th, and ended up coming in 4th place, just one spot shy of winning a trophy, and the difference was down to a few hundreds of a second. Afterwards we found out that the reason her car weighed in at 4.9 oz. instead of the allowed 5.0 that it used to be was because one of her weights had fallen off. We're pretty sure that had she had that last weight on there, that fraction of an ounce would probably have been enough to gain that hundredth of a second that she needed to place at state. Pretty cool, really! She did well! She got her trophy for 3rd place in design and her ribbon for participating, I took her picture, and we were done. No Nationals, if they have such a thing. ;)

On our way home we stopped at "The Dutch Cafe", which is a Mennonite-owned restaurant on Hwy 31 right across from Grissom Air Reserve Base. Oh MAN was that some serious food. Now I've lost 15.5 pounds so far, but I'm pretty sure I gained back a couple today, and I liked it. ;) They had a breakfast and dinner buffet going at the same time, and for one price you could mix and match whatever you wanted. We got there at 11:30, so both sounded good. The food was all homemade, with home-grown ingredients as they always do, and we just ate our weight in food. It was sinful good. Have you ever seen that Staples commercial where the guy goes from one item to another yelling "WOW! Now THAT'S a low PRICE!" Well, that's how we were with the food. "WOW! Now THOSE are some AWESOME potatoes!" "WOW! Those are REAL biscuits and apple butter!" Mmm, making me hungry again thinking about it...

When we got home we saw that our front yard pear tree was in full bloom. I have a 12-year tradition now that I take a picture of myself and my kids in front of that tree when it's in full bloom. I started with Devon, and moved on to Kaylee. In fact, one year I had my good 35mm camera on a tripod to do just that, the tripod fell over, and broke my camera, which was the impetus for getting the new digital Canon camera that Christmas. :) So this afternoon Steve took Kaylee & my photo in front of the tree. It does make me laugh though, because the tree has grown a little too tall for us to be able to get the white flowers behind our heads in the photo any more. I may have to get a little ladder or something to stand on from now on!

I took photos from today's festivities, which are up on Kaylee's site. Nathan took the T-6 over to Purdue for a pancake breakfast, its first time out and about since last Fall. Steve is camping out with Kaylee tonight up front, I took a huge nap this afternoon to catch back up on some of that sleep I needed, and it's been a lovely Saturday. :)