Did 'ya know there's a learning curve for KITES? Ugh. And trust me on this, if you've not gone out and tried to fly a kite in variable (and I mean, gusty/none sort of variable wind) you haven't had the fun that you are meant to have with your Asperger pre-engineer know-it-all child...
So, as my daughter is running around the field faithfully following my first set of instructions (just pull about twenty feet of line out, set the kite on the ground and RUN, maybe into the wind? Maybe NOT into the wind? No, try it that way, wait...lateral to the wind?), while I, at some point, vaguely recall a long talk with my father AGES (dark ages) ago, wherein he explained in excruciating detail the equation for how long the tail of a kite had to be for it to fly....
Wait, there's a TAIL?
Yep. And we had not unrolled either one, on either kite.
So...da Creature is getting impatient, agitated, vampirically opposed to the "sunlight" (it's a cloudy day, btw), and we are not getting anywhere.
Then the wind dies.
The strategically placed American flag on the pole in the field is NOT helping matters, as the know-it-all starts to wail every time it droops and declares the whole endeavor a bitter failure and retreats to the far side of the football field while I yell for him to get back to his sister...
Finally, one good strong breeze and the two are aloft! Both of them, side by side, her with the big red Angry Bird kite and him with the little red Angry Bird kite, and me able to finally take the picture that would not imprint him with an indelible memory of failure, but might persuade him to believe that we succeeded. It's all in the marketing, after all...and we had
FLOWN KITES in FICKLE WIND.
Victory.
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