Gone Fishin'

We dragged Whaley out again this afternoon while Clara was napping.  We also dragged out the toy fishing rod and fish, and Joe had a whale of a time (yes, yes we did just write that) snagging the fish from the whale pool and putting them in, alternately, the water table, a bucket, and Julie's lap.  By the time Birdie was up from her nap, he'd moved on to bowling with the pins and balls Grandma Connie and Grandpa Charles had given him.  But we all moved on not long after Birdie arrived on the scene because she's been in a bit of a state all weekend.  She's also her her hand crammed in her mouth most of the weekend, and at one point, gnawed on Julie's shoulder.  So we feel fairly confident that she's wearing her crazy pants because she has one or more two-year molars coming in, it hurts, and she's not quite sure what to do with herself.  Joe and Ted went to collect Berenice from "camp," and Clara and Julie did a loop of random errands.  The highlight of which was a toss up for Birdie: either seeing our friends Anne and Brent's dog through the window when we dropped off some things on their front stoop, or getting to stand on the ledge at the post office and drop all the letters into the outgoing mail slot.  So we did our best to take her mind off the fact that she was wearing her crazy pants.

That chair you see in the foreground of the first shot of Our Hero fishing is Joe's very own adirondack chair, which was given to him for his birthday by his demi-goddess celebrity sitters Sara and Emily.  He opened all of the presents that were brought to his party before going to bed last night, and was crestfallen when he learned that he could not then play with them.  Serious tears were avoided by the suggestion that he select the one he was going to play with the moment--the moment!--he awoke.  Our Hero selected the chair and it was indeed constructed by Our Hero and Ted with only a breakfast's worth of delay this morning.  (You can't see it in any of these pictures, but the chair has sharks on it.  It's pretty awesome.)