Fishing With a Water Baby

Belated Happy Mother's day to all those wonderful Mothers I know!

Kevin and Jack spoiled me rotten for Mother's Day this year. Kevin is good at planning things and being sneaky when he wants to and completely surprised me Saturday with a movie night after Jack went to bed. He even scored extra points by selecting the new Star Trek movie his 'closet-trekky' wife has wanted to see even though Star Trek and Sci-Fi are not really his thing.

On Sunday morning the boys took me out to breakfast and then we played hooky from church and went fishing down at Big Sandy Bay on the Salmon Reservoir. This was the first time we've gone fishing with Jack since he learned to walk (last summer he was in the backpack and slept through most fishing expeditions). It rapidly became apparent that fishing with a toddler creates whole new dimension to fishing. One person can fish, and the other has to keep Jack from going for a dip.

Jack has no sense of caution when it comes to the water...he is a 'water baby' to a fault. He walked right up to the edge of the water and would have kept on walking into the bay if we'd let him. Had it been a little warmer and a little less breezy we might have let him do just that so he'd realize that water and dry land are two totally separate entities. Alas, we traded off holding onto his overall straps while the other person fished. I see swimming lessons arriving in the near future......

To distract him from trying to take a swim we finally put water in a bucket and set him up with some shovels on the beach. That lasted for about five minutes and one mud pie, he then discovered the fishing bait...

I can now check off saying the phrase "Honey, please don't eat the worms....eeewww, yucky!" on my 'Motherhood Rights of Passage' checklist. Then again worms might not be so bad. He already takes the tennis ball out of the dog's mouth, dunks it in their less than clean water bucket, then sucks the water/drool mix from the felt cover. I cringe just thinking about it. As for the worms, he finally decided that eating them was not a good idea, but putting them in the snack cup with the cheerios and carrying them around was blast.

After a few hours of fishing and keeping the kid from having to be fished out of the water we headed home on the back roads. Saw a couple of Antelope, a huge garter snake (don't worry Carrie...Kevin took pictures for you!), and a bunch of Range cows. We stopped by the creamery in Buhl for ice-cream then went home and messed around in the yard for the rest of the day. A wonderful Mother's Day all around!