Fishing and riding in a "busss"

My extended family, most notably my grandfathers and dad and brother Grant, are avid fishermen. When we're together at the Lodge it is common for us to get up at the crack of dawn (well, maybe not that early) and get a few hours of fishing in before the rest of the group even rolls out of bed. Well, since Grandpa and Will are best buddies and were usually the first two people awake when we were up at the Lodge, on several mornings they went fishing together.



Will has been excited about fishing with Grandpa, and has talked with him about it on the phone, since our most recent trip to Lincoln - the two of them watched a few fishing shows together, and Will still holds his arms out as wide as he can (as in "this big") to describe the fish that they saw caught. So it was very fun for him to go with Grandpa and catch fish. At first Will was a bit scared of the fish, but eventually, with help and encouragement from Grandpa, he got brave enough to touch them. By the end of the trip, before we would throw any fish back, it became a requirement that Will touch them first.



It helped Will's interest in fishing to be able to do some himself, so one day Uncle Grant and Grandpa went into town and bought Will his own little fishing pole. He had a great time carrying and casting it in the water and around the house. A couple times when we went fishing, he insisted that I fish with his pole instead of a real one...



Obviously I don't have any pictures from when just the two of them (Gramps and Will) went out in the morning because I was taking full advantage of the sleep-in opportunities. But a few times we went out together later in the day, as did Erin (who by the way, despite her crippling fear of fish is a very good sport about fishing, as long as she doesn't have to touch the fish).



In the above pictures, Will's doing "blastoff" from Little Einsteins (like he did to help the plane take off), which helps the boat go faster.

Speaking of the boat, Will had an ongoing joke with Grandpa and whoever else wanted to play throughout the trip. Just a few weeks prior, he had learned how to pronounce the consonant 's', by learning what sound a snake makes at the library. So he worked on that for awhile, and on this trip, he discovered that he could pronounce the full word "bus", including the 's' on the end - instead of the previous pronunciation: "buh!". Anyway, he was particularly pleased with himself and repeated "a bussss" a lot on this trip, so inevitably we heard a lot of "busssses" on our boat rides together. Well, at some point we tried to teach him how to say "boat", and eventually a situation came up where we pointed to a boat and asked him what it was, and he responded "a busss!"

Thus began the joke. Even though he could sort of pronounce "boat" (more like "buht!"), he thought it was funny to argue with all of us - whenever we would see a boat Will would point at it and say "a Buss!" and laugh hysterically. We'd say "no, silly, that's a boat!" and he would say "naooo, a Buss!". More laughter, on and on.



Eventually, we got Will to say his version of "fish" too - which sounds kind of like "buss" - so he could recant his fishing stories to everyone else at the Lodge. It happens that Grandpa's fishing cap has a fish on it, and Will happily pointed this out fairly often. Like he often does with my Tigers cap, several times he insisted that he get to wear Grandpa's hat with the fish on it. Then of course Grandpa has to wear Will's hat in order for everything to be just right.