you get a line i'll get a pole, baby

for a great many reasons, i will be doing my very best to chronicle our wonderful adventures in our journey of natural learning. i'm a little late to start as i have missed our days at the zoo and at at atlantis. but, today is as good a day as any!

yesterday, having spent a lovely afternoon with our friends at the pool, the kids and i were rollin on home toward daddy and a quiet evening at home. i can't remember what triggered it but they came up with the idea that they wanted to go fishing. can we go fishing tomorrow, mom? i was more than delighted to say "of course!". i mean, how many people get to do that? just say yes to spontaneous adventure?

so after much dilly and dallying on my part and even more 'mom can we go fishing yet?' on their part this morning, we finally got going. it was off to A.I.D. to find a fishing rod (we had to negotiate around people wanting to pick their own rods in their favorite color) but we managed to conclude it was wiser to just get one for now incase we don't LOVE fishing.

after some less than helpful help and no rods at A.I.D. (more like unaid) we went to the kelly's empire and found ourselves a neat little kit complete with rod, lures, hooks and line for under $40. sold! off we went...

to potter's cay dock to locate some discarded conch parts ("slop") and advice about where the best place was to shop. i growled at myself when i realized that i had forgotten my bag with the camera in it (&*%^#!!!) as i watched them oooh and aaaah over the live conch layed out on the tables. both of them touching the little horns that poke out. we got our conch slop, popped by the house for our trusty swim bag and headed out to our chosen destination.

what great fun we had trying to figure it all out! between trying to put the sinker on the line, a malfunctioning reel on the rod and tangled line everywhere - we all learned to exercise patience, endure heat and how not to use a fishing rod. we eventually just used short lines and fed the fish. which was great fun for all three of us to see all the pretty little fish that swim so close to the shore (between 6 to 30 feet out).

then we we'd had enough fun playing with our fishy friends, the kids decided they wanted to play in the sand. lucky for me i have child-related ESP and packed our swim bag so they very merrily changed on the spot and hopped down to the water. we made more friends with many little crabs, some kirbs (sp?), limpets and even a few dragonflies.

Our most interesting find of the day. We still don't know what this is. It's squishy and bouncy and seems to have something moving about (swimming?) inside. It has been placed by Lauryn into home made 'sea' (salty) water.

This little white crab is one of our friends, the biggest by far of the crabs we saw which was still only just about as big as the palm of my (hand at the most). We oooohed and aaahed at it's beauty.

You can see these little explorers searching for new and interesting finds just off the shore. The last photo is of our very happy "classroom" of the day, the best kind which is no 'room' at all.

So all in all, we had ourselves a fish of a time today. We'll definitely go fishing again very soon.

I wonder what we'll be doing together on Wednesday?