Life With Boys

Life with boys … Alabama edition … a big part of our recent Alabama adventure was fishing … fishing from the dock … fishing with the neighbors dog … fishing with different kinds of bait and lures … fishing at different times of day … (I was not an active participant in all of this experimentation) … at one point it was decided that they should try to “sneak up” on the fish at the crack of dawn … (I was not a fan of this plan) … so they moved the Grandma’s kayak to the shore side of the dock … one boy suggested they create a kind of pulley system to help the person in the kayak move move smoothly, without disturbing the fish that were allegedly under the dock … it was overruled – we lacked pulleys and the desire to drive 30-minutes to go get some …

5 am the next morning they go to the not at all close to the house bait shop to go buy more live shrimp … the shop is out of shrimp so they settle for minnows … 6:30 am I hear someone in the next room waking up the boy … “get up, we have to find the kayak” … my ears perk up – what do you mean, find the kayak … apparently it is not on the dock where they left it … my brain goes to visions of thieves in the night absconding with the kayak … they had to be some determined thieves … we were not at all close to civilization … turns out the boy did not tie down the kayak or did not tie it down well … the kayak was three houses down the bay … pretty much underwater … the boy had to wade out and put his scout skills to work … see there is a reason they made him “turtle” so many watercraft … the kayak and its new resident sealift were saved … no fish were caught … and the boys went back to bed … which was fine with me … I was pretty fished out …