My two nephews are participating in something called the "Pinewood Derby" as part of Cub Scouts. Basically, you build a little wooden car and roll it down a track. I did something similar when I was a kid, but it's all a bit slicker now. We started off the project down at the hardware store, where they had a guy with a bandsaw cutting out the shapes the kids had traced for their cars.
Youngest Niece wanted to ride in my car back to her house. "I like music in the car, not talking!" she declared. None of you will be surprised that I've given more than a little bit of thought to what things in my music collection are suitable for 4-year-olds. Unfortunately, I didn't remember most of those thoughts, so I threw on Katatonia's
Last Fair Day Gone Night on the grounds that it's fairly melodic and doesn't have any screaming or swearing. (Well, not much screaming or swearing. I forgot that "Brave" is sung in a death growl and "Passing Bird" has a few f-bombs, but we didn't get that far into the album, so no worries.)
Youngest Niece declared "Yes! I like this song!" after the first few notes of this number, so I guess I didn't make a terrible choice:
She was of the opinion that it doesn't quite match up to the
Frozen soundtrack, though.
We got to the house, and I helped Younger Nephew put his car together. What really got Younger Nephew excited were the transfer decals for decorating the car. He very patiently cut out tiny decals of flames, stripes, dragon claws, and a dragon tail for the back of the car, and I rubbed them all onto the car with a blunt pencil. Fortunately, he was entirely unbothered by any of the mistakes I made - those decals are fiddly. I got pretty good at them by the time we got to the last few.
Below I give you a photo of the two cars, which do an excellent job of expressing the personality of their creators:
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