Fishing with Daddy

Every time Kalina reaches a 6-month marker (and ever since she turned 6 months old), we've upped our standards for her.

"No more mollycoddling!" we firmly tell each other after she's gone to bed. And in the past few months, "When she's 2, she'll go hungry if she doesn't eat the food on her plate! We can't drop everything and play with her every time she whines! She can choose two stuffed animals to bring with her anytime we leave the house, and that's IT!"

Fortunately for Kalina, she's so cute and relatively well-mannered that the actual changes are rather minor and inconsistent. (However, we have managed to limit her to one group of stuffed animals wherever we go: she can choose either her 4 cats, her 5 farm animals, or the Lamby and Mountain Lion pair. This is an improvement.)

And also, there are the happy changes: no more diapers for naps, a few more "treats" than we used to allow Kalina and baby gates that are collecting dust in corners rather than blocking her way as she runs laps around the downstairs of our house, as Kalina can easily navigate steps on her own and knows that the litter boxes are yucky.

But one of the biggest new developments is the privilege of being able to fish with Daddy. After feeding the brim (small fish that hang out in the shallows) with bread and noticing how fast they gobble it up, much to the entertainment of our toddler, Daddy couldn't help but toss a line in. On our first trip, he took the top part of a collapsible rod (so it'd be small enough for Kalina to hold), baited it with thawed frozen corn, and was pulling up a small fish not 10 seconds after lowering the hook into the water.

A few minutes later, Kalina had caught her first fish, and then caught several more without any help. I'm not sure I've ever seen her so proud.

Bedtime was approaching so we couldn't stay long, but Daddy and Kalina headed out again the following Saturday morning to catch their fill (figuratively, not literally). And here's what that looked like: