Girl Power

This morning we met a family from Minnesota. The dad is a pilot and his young teenage daughter has just started taking flying lessons. She had made the comment that everywhere she went, it was all men in aviation, that she never even saw another woman pilot where she was flying, so Chuck called me and I went on out and met everybody too. They were a very nice family and it was good to meet them all. I showed her and her dad in the Cheyenne and we talked for awhile about flight training and goals, and I'm pretty sure she'll do well in accomplishing her goals. Once she said that she was kind of getting used to being the only girl around, because everything she was most interested in was male-dominated. I just smiled and said "Yep." I gave her some places to look for more females in aviation if she cared to, and if nothing else she now has at least met one.

I am still a little uncomfortable with emphasizing the girl part of the flying, because it seems almost condescending, like it's so much harder for girls and what a great accomplishment it is if they can do it, unlike for boys where it's expected that they'll be able to. Annnnd, now I'm going to hear some version of that around the lunch table for the next week. ;) Anyway, but if I can encourage someone to keep following their dream even if they feel a little alone in it, and let them know they aren't the only ones, then I am all for that.

This evening I started up another Pinch Hitter ground course with a couple. The pilot spouse wanted to sit in, and that was fine. Usually we have the pilots leave so the non-pilots can ask whatever questions they want and not feel pressured or weird or "dumb" about it, and so the instructor can go over the material without input from the pilot all the time. We're doing a very basic, very simple version of the ground work, and a lot of times pilots want to interject all the knowledge they have in there, which is simply too much information for someone trying to get a bare bones picture to know what to do in case of emergency or just to help out on flights. But this went fine. At the end of two hours my voice was starting to crack, which I noticed happened last time I talked for two hours straight at a ground school. See, I told you I am not much of a talker in general. ;)

Kaylee is doing fine in school so far. She and her classmates are all getting along well, and she's doing fine on the work so far. She told me it's all easy and she knows it already, and I warned her that the reviews would be over soon and she'd be moving into new material pretty quickly here. She did have to switch desks with someone in her class because her desk was too small for her and the other child's desk was too big for them, and the swap was perfect. Kaylee is telling me this on the way home as I'm driving. The next thing she says was "but I made xxx clean off their desk first because they're the type of person that puts boogers and drool all over their desk all the time! I don't think the teacher ever sees xxx do that, but I do and it's DISGUSTING! I took my own chair with me so I didn't have to at least use xxx's drooly boogery chair too!"

Kaylee didn't much like it when I started laughing over that, but I couldn't help it.

She also piped up from the back seat "I can see what I'll look like when I'm older, and I'm fat." I sigh and launch into this speech. I don't get very far before she interrupts me and says all exasperatingly "No, Mom. I'm looking in these sunglasses sideways and I can literally see what I look like, and I look fat. You know, stretched out? I was just kidding about the 'when I get older' part." Right. One health and body image speech, on pause...