Rite of Passage

According to the fishing world, my little boy is no longer little but a BIG boy! He experienced a rite of passage yesterday as a fisherman!

We wanted to give Grace one more Sunday out of the nursery this weekend to make sure she is 100% healed, so we decided it was the perfect weekend for a "Daddy and Garrett" weekend. With us all being sick, there has been lots of time (again!) spent inside. Garrett was in desperate need of some quality time just being a boy outside in the great outdoors. Daddy was happy to oblige with fun and adventure!

A lot of Saturday was spent with the boys at the neighborhood pond doing some "practice" fishing for their big day on Sunday. Several perch and some bass were caught by the fisherman. Garrett also caught his little, yellow plastic fish a million times over! On a quick side note, their fishing was cut short that day because Jeff accidentally got a barbed hook stuck in his finger, pretty much down to the bone. He was absolutely determined he was not returning to any kind of medical facility in the near future, so he decided to do manly man surgery on his finger to remove the hook. I'll spare you the gory details that he didn't spare his wife. We're thinking he may have to break down and go to a medical facility this week to get a tetanus shot. A dirty hook and the oh-so-not clean pocket knife he used were not the most sterile of operating instruments. None the less, the boys felt prepared for the fishing ahead of them.







The rite of passage started at 5:30 AM Sunday morning (need I point out that 5:30 AM comes BEFORE the sun comes up?!). Jeff and PaPa took my sweet, two-year-old little boy out of his bed, with his nite-nite blanket I might add, and secured him in his car seat. They then drove to Fayette County Lake and turned him into a BIG boy! Now, Garrett has fished pretty much since he could walk and hold a fishing pole, but that fishing was done in small stints, usually in the middle of the day, or in the bathtub with a toy fishing pole. Yesterday, Garrett fished from sun up until way late in the afternoon in a boat in the middle of the lake, a full day of fishing! To be honest, we were all thinking that this was going to either be a huge success or a huge bust. We weren't completely sure if he could hang in there all day, but he was so excited to go that everyone wanted to give him a chance to try. I knew that when I woke up to a text saying, "Your son is a fishing stud!" that it was going to be good day.

The overall highlights were that everyone had LOTS of fun, they caught lots of fish, Garrett got to practice reeling with the big boys' fishing poles, he somehow lost the plastic fish on his pole but then got to have real bait on his line (without the hooks!), he lasted the entire day in an overall great mood, he drove the boat, and he didn't fall in the lake (one of Mommy's main requests!)! Surprisingly, the only things he dropped in the lake were his floating pole (over and over!), one toy, and Daddy's pliers. Not bad for a whole day of fishing with a two-year-old!











Jeff didn't go into this rite of passage with no sense of reality. He knew Garrett would need some other form of entertainment besides fishing for lunkers. He went prepared with a goody bag of toys. The bag itself kept him just as entertained as the toys inside. When that bag got boring, he moved onto the closest tackle bag and worm bag.