My 9 year old daughter fell in love with Amelia 3 years ago when she announced to me that she was going to be an airline pilot. (That high pitched squeal you year is the sound of my bank account crying in TERROR!) She has an entire wall of photos of famous "Lady Pilots." I thought she would grow out of the airline pilot thing but she went on to learn the 24 hour clock, AND can convert it to zulu. She can read text weather, decipher NOTAMS, can identify all of the flight control surfaces, can identify airliners on final over the interstate (I-170 in STL runs right along the thresholds for the 30's) I didnt make her learn this. She asked me to teach her. This little girl wants to fly! And she has become fascinated with the Earhart project. When the indiegogo run was going, she and I took this photo to post to my facebook timeline to see if we could get any of my friends to donate. Notice I am wearing a green bracelet. Elsie made it for me because I had mentioned wanting an elephant hair bracelet but I couldnt afford to get one that was created humanely. She looked them up in the school library and went into our craft bin and found a piece of nylon clothesline leftover from when I hung a new line in our backyard. She wound it into my "elephant hair" bracelet. I wear it every day.
She was so sad that TIGHAR couldnt get to NIKU this year. She had asked to see the fundraising page every day to see where it had gotten to. I hated having to tell her that the money hadn't been raised. She asked me again tonight. "Did they get the money yet?" I explained the predicament to her. So my little baby looked at the bracelet on my wrist and said. "What if I made more of those bracelets? Could we sell them and make the money?"
*Insert mom laughing/crying.*
Just goes to show you, even in this day and age when kids want Ipods, and Ipads, and I-whatevers, and couldn't care less about history, there are still little girls who look to the sky every time they hear an airplane fly overhead and are captivated by something that happened almost 7 decades before they were born!
