On Friday afternoon I was working on finishing a project quickly before putting my sweet boys down for a nap. At precisely the time I was ready to call them up, Elliott comes upstairs to show me what he had been diligently working on at the kitchen table for the last few minutes. My little monkey had found a very large stick, resourcefully gotten the kite string down from its basket in the garage, and constructed his very own version of a fishing pole.
So what did we do?
We abandoned naps for the day and headed down the street to the duck pond.
To say they were excited is an understatement!
All of these ducks had been resting peacefully on the bank but quickly fled to the safe confines of the water as my anything-but-quiet brood of boys announced their arrival.
Elliott immediately sat down and got to work. He was excited because, "See, Mom! There's even a hook on the end that the fish will get caught on."
Gabe got to work quickly as well. He hastily tossed in our entire package of bait, upsetting his brothers and himself that there was nothing left. (It should be noted that our bait was hot dog buns. I insisted we not waste time looking for worms in our parched, cracked soil before we left the house.)
After Gabe had disposed of our bait, we realized we had another problem. Somehow, in the 3 minutes it took us to get from our house to the pond, Caleb had misplaced his paperclip. "There's no way I will catch a fish without it, Mom. The paperclip was going to hook the fish." I agreed to head home but made them sit by each other first so I could get this photo. I only got one shot because no sooner had they heard the shutter and they were back on their bikes, Gabe in the stroller, and we were headed back home to gather more equipment.
We put together another line with a new paperclip for C-man. He could hardly contain his excitement. I grabbed a stale loaf of bread so we could have more bait and we headed back out the door.
Caleb wasted no time casting his "line" and as you can see Gabe was already busy at work tossing in bread. (This time I tore up the pieces into tiny chunks in hopes that it would last longer!) There are some seriously large fish in this pond. You can see one to the right of Caleb's line, coming up to eat some of the bread. The boys inform me that they are small mouth bass. It could be, for all I know, which is nothing.
I desperately wanted to capture the fish as they surfaced but the little boogers are too fast for me. You can see the dark shadow of one underneath the ripples.
Gabe was a faithful bait distributor the entire time. "FISH!" He would yell with each toss. The amount of bread he gave them might have something to do with their size.
Though Elliott was the mastermind behind this entire plan, he didn't have the capacity to maintain the life of a fisherman for long. It might be that he can't sit still (except for but a second for me to snap these cute photos of him) or it might be that he is always hatching another plan, or it might be that he is three and is part monkey or part squirrel or both.
Caleb, on the other hand, could have stayed here until next Friday. Though at firstI had to convince him that he needed to leave his paperclip hook in until he felt something tugging, it didn't take long for him to catch on. This boy of mine was convinced that he would actually catch a fish with his make-shift equipment. And boy did he try. And he looked so cute doing it!
We finally had to call it quits when Gabers reached in and grabbed the last piece of bread. No more bait meant no more fish.
I requsted they all it together for one last shot. They obliged!
No one caught any fish on Friday, but I caught a whole bunch of memories on my camera so that they might not ever forget the Friday when mom let them skip naps!
