I Heart Heights

So I took the kid to the rock climbing place tonight. She’s gone a couple of times on the mobile rock climbing thingy’s at community events and she really seemed to like it so I thought we'd try the real deal.

One of my proudest moments with her was a few years ago when she went on the mobile rock climbing thingy for the first time. She was scared out of her skull, but didn’t really want to show it. I told her she would be fine and to go try it out. She made it up about a third of the way and then dropped back down, because she was too scared, "I can’t do it." I looked at her and pointed to the top, "You can totally do it, go all the way up and ring that bell up there, it will be cool, you can totally do it."

She turned back to the wall, looked up at it, took a deep breath and started climbing. It took her forever to climb up that damn wall; she was shaking and sweating and breathing hard (fear of death is a good thing to expose a child to, right? Right.) Then after about 5 minutes of that fear she managed to make it all the way to the top. She reached her shaking hand out and rang the bell and then looked back down to me with the biggest smile I’d ever seen.

She pushed off the wall and repelled back down to the ground. Before she even hit solid ground she screamed, "I DID IT!" I nodded as she raced right back up the wall.

It not that she’s a fearless kid, it’s that she’s a kid that will try stuff even if she is afraid of it. I think that is pretty cool. Then again, I haven’t seen the effects of a teenager with this mentality, so it might lose its coolness soon.

So tonight we went to the rock climbing place to bond and climb and conquer.

Uh, it turns out I’m pretty afraid of heights. I think I already knew that, but I don’t think I’ve ever had the occasion to be quite so high off the ground with only my hands holding me. Hmmm.

See, you go up the wall, and that part I don’t mind. But then you have to repel back down the wall. You’d think that wouldn’t be a difficult thing, seeing as though there is a nice little rope/repeller thing attached to you and you’ve seen that no one else has plummeted to their death while doing this. But then.



See, it’s really not in my natural make-up to throw myself off of walls. Something just didn’t feel right about that. It took me about three climbs before I was able to do it. And after I did it, it was actually kinda fun.

My favorite part of the video is the overwhelming support I received from the child. I promise that when I was encouraging her on the rock wall a mere three years ago I never said, "You suck." They grow up so fast.