Fishing & Parent’s Night Out

We took Tyler fishing for the first time with his new rod.  Trent fished as well since he has a license.  I don’t have a license, so no fishing for me.  My duties included keeping an eye on Tyler, some casting, line fixing (and there was lots of this – more later), bait holding, fish watching and other assorted odds and ends.  Tyler does pretty good with fishing.  He knows how to cast with an open reel, which is a lot of work.  My only issue is that he doesn’t keep enough tension in the line (which you can see from the beginning pics because the tip of his rod is down) and that means he has lots of line problems.  I swear I had to fix his line every 3 or 4 of his casts.  Sometimes it was easy because I can cast farther so by my casting and reeling in, it gets fixed.  Sometimes it required pulling lots of loose line of and rereeling it.  And a few times I needed Trent’s help because the mess was so big.  Luckily we only had to cut the line once.

The fish weren’t biting at the first lake we went to, Juno Lake, and Tyler was having some issuew with the weeds and rocks that were by the shore.  So we headed to another lake, Paradise Lake.  We weren’t there for 5 minutes and Tyler caught a fish.  It was a bluegill and a keeper, so into the bucket it went.  We did forget a net for over the bucket and the fish did jump out a few times so we kept having to put it back in the bucket.  After that Trent caught a few little bluegill, but no more keepers.  They both did a wonderful job of feeding the fish at this lake the bait because everytime they cast and reeled in, their bait would be gone.  So around 11:30 we finally decided to call it a day (we had started around 8:30).  We released the fish Tyler caught since 1 fish isn’t worth the effort of trying to get it home.

Tyler loved fishing.  He kept telling us that he thought we were fishing for only 15 minutes, not 3 hours.  He’s also sure he needs to go out on a boat because he is sure that the bigger fish are in the deeper water.  We still don’t think he’s ready to go fishing with Grandpa, but maybe we can borrow the boat one time and show him what boat fishing really is like.

Here are the pics that I took:

2008 – Fishing on July 4th

 

In the afternoon, Tyler relaxed because he had Parent’s Night Out at TKD last night.  Mr. Birky feeds them pizza and non-caffeinated pop (he’s big about the non-caffeinated pop – I’m sure he doesn’t want to watch a bunch of sugared up kids for 3 1/2 hours and I don’t blame him.)  They play games and last night they had some fireworks.  Tyler was hot and tired when we went to pick him up.  He had 3 pieces of sausage pizza and Sprite to drink.  They played a bunch of game like capture the flag, tag, etc.  They did the fireworks.  And Mr. Birky said that they also did lots of pushups, situps and running because when they lost on a game, that’s what they had to do.  Sounds like a great recipe for wearing kids out.  Last night there was only 8 kids, but Tyler said he made some new friends.  And he told us this one kid (he can’t remember his name) has an eel for a pet.  He thought that was really cool.

Now this meant that Trent & I actually got a date last night.  And to celebrate the fact that we met one another 10 years ago yesterday, we went all out.  Just kidding!  We were going to go to this place that has good gyros, but they weren’t open.  So we ended up at Culver’s, home of the butter burger.  We did not get butter burgers, and we’d say that the burgers we did have are better than average for a fast food place.  We did have a Cement Mixer, which is made with frozen yogurt instead of ice cream.  It was awesome.  I highly recommend them.  Then we went to a park and walked around and talked.  We walked almost 4 miles last night and did lots of talking.  We both agreed that it was tough to know what to fill our time with away from the house and without a kid.  Maybe we just need more practice.  So I’m hoping Mr. Birky keeps doing Parent’s Night Outs.