Gone Fishing

It is butt freezing cold here and we are trying to keep Jay from climbing the walls and swinging from the ceiling fans.

So, this afternoon we went ice fishing in our living room.

(What? This is Wisconsin.)

We drove to the craft store and picked up foam sheets in assorted colors, a package of small magnets, pom-poms and wooden dowels. From the grocery store we snagged a couple of empty cardboard boxes. Once at home we set to making up our ice shanty and stocking our lake with neon foam fish. I used a hot glue gun to secure a magnet to the foam fish we cut out. Then I tied fishing line to dowels and, on the other end of the line, I glued “bobbers” (neon green pom-poms) with magnets glued to their bottoms. Meanwhile, Chris set up his deer blind in the living room, which made for a very nice ice shanty.

When it was time, Jay and I left the condo to “go fishing”. We went down one set of stairs and back up the other, swinging our fishing poles and “hiking” through the rugged terrain of our condo building hallway. We walked back through the door and onto beautiful Lake Gavin two minutes later. This was enough time for Chris to set a piece of white foam board with a hole cut out of it over the top of our cardboard box with fish and put it into the ice shanty.

Jay could hardly contain himself. He played right along and pretended to shiver while we got into the shanty and pulled out our fishing poles. We scooped out the ice chucks from our hole in the ice with Chris’ ice scoop and we sat on upside down five gallon buckets and held our fishing poles over the ice hole. Jay reeled them in one after another. In the end though, we decided to catch and release, because as Jay informed me, "They were too small to keep."

But you should have seen the one that got away…