Fishing @ Minto Brown Park

Maisie loves to go pretend fishing. Every night before we put her down to sleep (in California) she would cuddle in bed with us for a few minutes and would pretend our bed was a big fishing boat. She would (with a foxtail remember those things?) catch "mama" and "dada" fishes. Which required us to get off the bed swim/crawl around on the floor and wait for her to throw in her "line" and we would take the bait and she would reel us in. We aslo had to jump up, flop on to the bed and wiggle around while Maisie would excitedly yell "I caught a big mama fish!"Let me tell you, it's quite the exercise pretending to be a fish especially when your toddler keeps saying "I'm going to catch another mama fish" when it's clearly dada's turn. 

Ok sweet girl, but are you sure you don't want to catch a BIG dada fish this time?

So after our move, Austin made her a makeshift fishing pole out of a stick, some string and a magnet. We also cut out fishes from cardstock put a paper clip on them and let her fish all around the house. She was in heaven. She wanted to take the fishing pole everywhere, but due to the safety of everyone's eyes we had to limit the places she could take it. Like the car, shopping cart and any sort of store. She even asked for it to come take a nap with her.

I remember Katie and I being obsessed with making our own fishing poles when we were little. We would ask Mom and Dad for some bread/cheese/whatever and beg them to take us to Minto Brown, actually convinced we would catch something. We never did. But after remembering this, I wanted to take Maisie to my old "fishing spot" and let her have a try. No hook, no bait, no bobber (she did ask for one though haha) and let her get the feel for it. She needed no tips from us she knew exactly what to do. She flung in her string (and magnet) bobbed it up and down, pulled it in slowly and threw it back in. I'm convinced she would have stayed there all day if we had let her, but we had a bag of stale bread waiting to be devoured by some gluttonous ducks.

Phone Pictures:

On the end of her line is the mangled remains of a paper fishy.