Fish and Tell

Today Anya produced this picture to share with her kindergarten class when she was asked to "Draw a real story that was definitely not pretend".

Center stage you can see Anya reeling in a fish, followed in the upper right by "Dad using a knife to cut open the little fish to use his guts as bait", and lastly you can see Morgana the cat (under foot)  eating said fish.

So while Amy is telling the world of Anya's more notable achievements of the first weeks of school, daddy is (of course) proud of her newly found love of fishing. 

Anya's dad is an obsessive person, and it warms the stream-chilled depths of my heart to hear Anya give voice to my thoughts as we pass any river stream or pond: "You think there are fish in there?"  She's really taken to it.  When mom says, "What shall we do this weekend?" Anya will invariably say, "Go fishing. Or how about a hike TO a fishing river," in hopes of making mom think there's something in the deal for her.  But we all know it's about the fishing. 

The last three times Grandpa and/or I have taken her fishing, she has been the one to catch the fish. It's starting to make her a bit cocky. She gives advice and helps me pick out lures and bait. 

She's pretty good at casting. 

Given the choice between reeling in a fish and netting a fish, she'll always choose to net one...which is fine by me. 

She just informed me that the above was a "sad picture".  This is because the fish who died, was young, and small and died when it swallowed the hook.  No one wanted it to die.  This is always traumatic for Anya.  That being said, once a fish is above about 12 inches, all bets are off and she's asking to be the one to club it. I guess she supposes that, as a fish ages, it becomes necessarily and irrevocably corrupt and therefore has it coming. 

Here are some other photos of the kid fishing.

Grandpa holds ups a little perch Anya caught at Twin Ponds.  She caught three that day.

Anya holds up a worm she would eventually use to pull in a little Rainbow Trout at Fish Lake near Leavenworth.  We fished with her cousin Kalea and "uncle" Matt and her great uncle Rick.  We caught and released that little guy, but not before the girls dropped it on the deck and knocked it senseless.  We assured her it lived...but I have my doubts. 

Here is Anya's word-for-word retelling of the story:
Once I got a fish, deep in the water.  Even though the fish were lurking right below us we tried our best, even though we only caught one for each kid in the boat.  Well, the dock boat.  When the fish struggled on the pole, we definitely knew when they're on. The fish of course, got a dream of sadness when the fish bumped his head. The little bass that Kalea caught, in our little dock boat, on our fishing trip didn't bonk his head but it struggled.  It was the bass of course.  Then I got a stamp from Seattle Gymnastics Academy (AKA end of story)