Parachuting Bear

The girls and I got to talking about why jumping out the window would be a bad idea, when the obvious question we've all asked came up: "What if we jumped with a parachute?" Comon, we've all thought it. I started explaining, and decided it'd be better for us to give it a try. We built a parachute out of ribbon, an old hospital blanket and used a stuffed animal as our test pilot.

On our test-flight, I figured I chuck up it up far and high to give maximum time for the chute to open. I threw it a little too far apparently, and ended up sticking it about 30 feet up in this tree. Apparently, this was very obvious to my wife as she was watching, but I hadn't really taken into consideration.



We (ok, it was all me) devised an ingenious grappling hook out of one of Cathie's decorative candle holders and we proceeded to chuck it out the window and try and hook it on the bear, the tree or parachute. After a few throws, we got the bear back and we revised our trajectory.

If the bear had been real, it would have died many, many times as we tested our the chute. In the end, it worked pretty well. In the beginning it was fun for Emily to run down and retrieve it, but she soon (soon for a third child, that is - about 5 times) learned it was a lot of work. We then began to use our same grappling hook to pick it up off the ground, which became as much fun as throwing the bear out the window.

In the end, I'm not sure if they really learned that they shouldn't jump out the window, even with a parachute. When I was a kid, I tried to repel out my window using a harness I'd built out of belts and rope, tied to my dresser. In the end, I racked myself something fierce as my belt loops gave way and the dresser fell over. I ended up suspended about half way down the side of our house without a way to get up or down.