When good beach trips go bad

Hope everyone out there had a great St. Patty's Day. I spent it in the way a non-Irish, non-drinking person should.....watching Darby O'Gill and the Little People. Until you've seen a young Sean Connery sing, you really haven't lived. All I know is that I've wanted to go to Ireland since the first time I saw this movie as a little kid, and my opinion hasn't changed two and a half decades later.

This weekend brought a trip to the beach with my brothers and their significant others, plus a special guest appearance by Garth and his lovely wife and daughter. A good time was had by all and included such activities as crabbing, NCAA Tourney viewing, gambling at the casino, jogging, watching New Moon, and of course, kite flying.

This was my first kite flying experience in a good 20 years so it was bound to be a disaster, but every dad has to fly kites with his son at the beach, right? Well, we went and bought the best Buzz Lightyear kite $2 can buy and hit the beach for some hardcore kiting. (Editor's Note: I wasn't sure "kiting" was a word, so I used dictionary.com to find out. Turns out it means writing a check on insufficient funds. I should've used "kite-flying," but I like "kiting" better.) Problem was that there were pre-hurricane force winds going on so the kite spent more time being slammed into the ground than flying. Being the experienced kiter that I am, I (wrongly) assumed that I just needed to run with the kite to get it above the ground level winds and up into the jet stream. So, using Jonah's favorite phrase, I yelled "watch this!" and took off running into the wind, our cheap Buzz Lightyear kite trailing behind me looking like it may be ripped to shreds at any moment. While I'm watching the kite to see if it is gaining altitude. It isn't. In fact, it's losing altitude. A split second later, so was I. You see, I should've been watching the ground, because the ocean has a funny habit of depositing bus stop bench sized logs of driftwood in the way of kiters such as myself. I hit this thing hard enough that my hands were not quick enough to break my fall, so my face did the honors. I ate sand like a true idiot, and now I'm lying in the fetal position on the beach with a mouthful of sand, a bleeding leg and a freakin' Buzz Lightyear flopping around me like a fish out of water. My wife is crying she's laughing so hard and Jonah just keeps saying "Daddy fell down!" A truly proud moment in parenting for me.