I\u2019m not sure if everyone was as engrossed with the saga of balloon boy today as our little corner of the office was.<\/p>\n
A short recap:<\/p>\n
At approximately 11 AM, one of my co-workers informed us that there was something going on, that a six-year-old boy had somehow gotten into a homemade helium balloon and was flying through the Colorado air at a high altitude and at high speeds.<\/p>\n
I checked Twitter and turned on a live video feed. The Internet was on fire with balloon boy. It was gut-wrenching to watch the live video: a small balloon whizzing through the air with a small enclosure at the bottom where the boy might be. We were all quite nervous when the balloon started to lose helium and to descend.<\/p>\n
At around 12:30 PM, it landed relatively softly and rescue crews began deflating what was left and looking for the boy in the balloon. He wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n
And there was this moment, this second of absolute terror, because there were now two possibilities: that he had never gotten in the balloon at all or that he had fallen out of the balloon<\/em>.<\/p>\n It turns out that it was the former. The boy (named Falcon) had been hiding in the family\u2019s attic in a cardboard box for hours.<\/p>\n If you search for the story now, you\u2019ll find cynical stories about it being a publicity stunt by the family. But putting all that aside, putting aside why Falcon hid in a cardboard box in the attic for hours when his family was looking for him, those two hours in the middle of the day today were emotional.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t know who this boy was, but it didn\u2019t matter. It was happening right now<\/em> and there were so many ways that it could have ended badly. It was a moment when we were all just frozen and helpless, watching a balloon fly through the air, armed with nothing but hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m not sure if everyone was as engrossed with the saga of balloon boy today as our little corner of the office was. A short recap: At approximately 11 AM, one of my co-workers informed us that there was something going on, that a six-year-old boy had somehow gotten into a homemade helium balloon and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[263,143,264],"class_list":["post-551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-year26","tag-balloon-boy","tag-internet","tag-news","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.scott-n-katie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}