Baby Bottle Lab

The other day, I joined my peers in one of the strangest labs I have encountered. We used baking soda, and vinegar mixed together in careful calculations to determine a number of moles that would give the baby bottles enough thrust to propel them through a six-meter gutter filled with water, in order to calculate the amount of moles of CO2 produced by the baking soda and the vinegar.  I succeeded one time in all my efforts to get the bottle to span the length of the gutter.  I was often confused by why my bottle would not go nearly as far as anyone elses when used with the same amounts of vinegar and baking soda, and if I were ever to do it again, I would probably just find a different bottle to use that would hopefully give me better results.  One of the questions I'm supposed to answer in this blog was "Why are limiting reactants determined by stoichiometric amounts?"  Unfortunately the only way I feel that I can answer this question, in all honesty, is that I don't believe that "stoichiometry" is a real word, and I hope that I won't get docked points for saying that.