The Plague & Kite Flying

Have you ever seen the movie Contagion?  We've had the real live version here on a smaller scale (thank you Norovirus) and it wasn't pretty.  Kids were dropping like flies.  Parents eventually getting it.  One could have wondered if it was some sort of terrorist attack.  Kidding...sort of.  It was madness.  Absolute madness, I tell you.  Both thankfully and not thankfully (if that's even correct grammar), J flew to Orlando for business Friday morning at the crack of dawn and missed it.  I was glad he didn't come down with it, but I was wishing he was here when I was on what seemed like my death bed.  The girls both came down with it Wednesday which gave us a few bonus days prior to our Spring Break this week.  However, I'm not sure you would categorize those horrible days as a "bonus".  Surely not.  They were both pitiful.  I thought I escaped it, but Friday proved to be a different story.  We managed somehow, and by Sunday when J got home we were all feeling like new money.  I can laugh about it now, but if you would have seen the texts flying between my friend Ginny and me you'd think we'd gone loco.  It's kind of hilarious now that I think about it.  I'd get a "man down...so-and-so's been hit" message every other minute.  It was like we were living in a war zone.  I knew it was bad when I had to be interviewed by the health department to try to help them find the common source.  J was convinced it had to be in the water...I'm not so sure he wasn't on to something!

I can't move on without reporting on this...no pun intended.  At school Towns has been doing a unit called From Farm to Me.  To round it out, they each had to pick something to research, do a project on it, and then present it to the class.  Thank goodness Towns chose "from cotton to t-shirt" as opposed to "from pig to bacon" or something of that nature that a couple of boys in the class really found interesting.  Not so much us!  She had the idea to act like she was a news reporter and present it as a news story.  So she wrote her script and we headed to a local cotton field to tape her doing her thing.  It totally cracked us up because she sounds so country in it.  She couldn't quit giggling as the tape was rolling...
As always, Mrs. Propst had her take questions from her "audience"...

Little did we know that would be the last day of school for a while for her...bless her heart!

Since we were feeling more like ourselves Sunday, we ventured out of the house for the first time in five days.  The wind was blowing like crazy and flying kites sounded like a superb idea.
The girls were loving it...

And so was our new pooch Charlie...
She absolutely had a fit over Cate's kite!
And J almost had a fit of another kind trying to get the blasted thing to fly...

We finally gave up and Buggy carried it around pretending it was her pet.  She's got an imagination like you wouldn't believe.
Charlie even got a chance to fly Towns' kite which was the only that worked...
She's such a good girl...

And she's happiest when J is holding her like a baby...

Anyway, it was all fine and good until J and I had another one of our great ideas that starts out sounding fun but usually ends up with someone hurt, crying, or both.  When flying the kites the normal way had become boring to them, we decided to let the kite go and see who could run the fastest to catch it.  We figured out the hard way that you need some weight on the end of it if the kids were going to run it down because the wind was blowing so hard and carrying it so fast.  All we had in J's car was a cheap orange  life jacket.  Perfect.  We had a trial run before we sent the kids after it...
Mind you, I've got a pretty massive zoom lens on my camera and they were a long way away.  All the way back they were getting instructions on what they needed to do...
They said they were ready.  So we let it go and off they went.  Right about then, the wind really picked up and they had to kick it up a notch.  They were literally trying to go faster than their little legs would possibly carry them.  I should have had my video camera...we could have won a cash prize on television.  Because they way they tangled up and did a face plant into the grass as the both tried to dive on it was almost more than I could take without tears rolling down my face.  All I could see was them hit the ground, Cate's legs straight in the hair, and then them scrambling to get up to blaze a trail again.  Only problem with that is that they weren't even close to catching it and all they could do is stand in the middle of the field and cry.  Not over the fact that they were covered in dirt and grass and their legs were beat up like crazy, but because the kite was a goner.  Meanwhile, this is what happened...
Please note the life jacket caught in the power lines on the left, and the kite flying high above the trees near the right.  It was so windy that the kite kept right on soaring even though it was hung up.  The kids were hysterical and telling us that we had the worst ideas ever.  That's when J grabbed a rod and reel (from when he took the girls fishing last week), hooked the life jacket and tried to reel it in.  Cue the cheers and them changing their tune to, "Daddy you're the best!"  It worked like a charm until the kite string broke, naturally.  Tears.  Again.

They went to buy a new kite today to try it all again.  J just called asking if I knew of anywhere they sold kites that would actually lift a kid off the ground.  I'm thinking it's time to intervene before it's not a life jacket, but one of our children caught up in the power lines!

Spring Break is in full effect here, and the fact that Towns' birthday is Thursday makes it even better.
I feel a fiesta coming on...