Jun 21 2009
Father’s Day 2009
Today was the best Father’s Day I’ve had yet…
The day started off with me getting to sleep in; an amazing way to start off the day. After getting up, my wife immediately poured me a coffee with Bailey’s. Score!!!!
Once I had fully woken up, the kids and my wife gave me their cards and gifts. Afterwards, we went out for breakfast at IHOP and then on to the highly anticipated activity of the day. We were all going fishing.
Now, it’s important to understand one fact: I have never gone fishing before in my life. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe that at the age of 34, that I have never been. The only time I have done something remotely like fishing was for about 5 minutes, back when I was in Boy Scouts at a camp in the Haliburton area, and that was with a fishing rod that had no bait, and I’m fairly certain the lake had nothing but minnows.
So, we drove out to Mission to Sun Valley Trout Park where they have a small pond stocked with… well, trout of course! My wife had heard of this place on the TV show “The 100 Mile Diet“, and she thought that this would be something that would be fun to do for Father’s Day. With our brand new fishing rods in hand (that we had purchased earlier this week), we started setting the kids up. Fortunately, my wife used to go fishing a fair bit when she was a kid, so she showed me and the kids what to do. We set up our middle daughters’ rod first and let her get started. She cast out once, and within about 3 minutes, she had caught one! We still hadn’t finished setting up the other two kids rods and she had caught one! We helped her out, and then got our youngest daughter set up. Five minutes later, she caught one! Once we had helped her, we got my oldest daughter ready and then me.
After about a half hour, I caught my very first fish!
I have to admit, I was very happy! My oldest daughter was determined to catch one. Sadly, after another two hours, she still hadn’t caught one and was ready to call it quits.
After we left the park, we came home. Thanks to the power of the Internet and YouTube, I learned how to clean and cook trout. I’m happy to say that dinner turned out very well, considering it was swimming around less than 6 hours prior.
That was how I spent my Father’s Day! It’s always nice to spend time with my family and this day always makes me think on how I can be an even better dad.