A Red Cottage Life: 30 Feet Up and a Zip Line Down

I have been MIA this week. For good reason though. You see, I have been with my kids attending various events with my kids through an awesome program in the GA Foster Care System called the Independent Living Program. This program teaches our kids life skills like, self confidence, cooking, how to buy/rent a house, money management and the list goes on. I could write forever on this program, but as you can tell by the title of this post that is not the point of this post.

Monday's ILP event was teambuilding and self confidence. We went to a boy scout camp and the kids did a ropes course and team building activities in the morning. I had court so I met up with the kids during lunch. And after lunch...

You guessed it! We climbed a 30 foot pole and zip lined down...

Now I have confession to make. I was so looking forward to this. Really. Just ask my Daddy. I was psyched. But there is nothing like being 30 feet in the air and seeing how high that really is to sober up some of that excitement.

So that is what happened. I climbed up and froze. Literally. I could not go. I sat on the little ledge thing for like 6 minutes while my kids yelled things like "Come on Miss M. you can do it!" "Miss M. you are brave, come on just jump off." The whole time I am thinking "damn it...how in the hell did I get myself into this situation!" But I did it. I had to. After encouraging my kids and telling them that they could do it...and all of them did...I could not very well climb down the pole now could I.

So look at the pictures below really well; because frankly my friends, I will not be doing this again. (The pictures are sooo much better larger-the lighting that day was terrible-I tried to make them larger as you can probably tell in the first two pics but it just distorted the image so I decided not to enlarge them-I think you can get the idea though :))

Picture #1: Me Climbing the pole. Notice me hugging the pole. This should have been my first indication that this was not a good idea.

Picture #2: Me sitting on the ledge where I spent quite some time. I know why they make it so little. . .if it were bigger people would just stay up there and never come down. I should also point out that at this point the man hooking up my harness to the zip line is telling me over and over again that the line can hold up to 60,000 pounds. I could have cared less. I was 30 feet in the air.

Picture #3: Yes, I finally decided to "zip down." Notice my mouth is wide open. That's because I am screaming bloody murder. In fact, as soon as I got down my kids kept saying "Wow, Miss M., you screamed louder than anyone!" One of my kids even told me "I am so glad you don't yell as loud as you could when you get upset with us for doing things we shouldn't!"