He's Got Moves, and He Knows How to Use Them!

Today, Nathaniel had the opportunity to listen to two live bands at different events.  Both times he seemed to lose himself in the music.

The first one was at the ice cream social our church had this weekend. He headed off to his own space and just enjoy the moment.


The second one was at our neighbor's party across the street. The band was really good, and Nathaniel really got into the music. Unfortunately, the lighting isn't that good, but I think you get an idea what kind of sweet moves Nathaniel has. The kid's got rhythm and creativity, that's for sure. Kristina laughs every time she watches this one.


Christopher

I'm a Fish! I'm a Minnow!

Slowly but surely, I'll continue to share stuff from the recent past.  This time, I'm once again taking you to the Lake in Minnesota.  During most of our 11 days at the cottage, Nathaniel preferred to stay in the knee/thigh depth water wading and splashing.  Toward the end, however, we decided to push Nathaniel a bit past his comfort zone and were amazed to see how far he would go.

First we started by having him jump to us from the shore side of our side dock.  Slowly but surely, I continued to move around the side of the dock.  I got him to go a little further each time, until I had him jumping off the deeper side of the side dock (but he could still stand at that depth).

The next morning he started where we left off and he got more and more enthusiastic.


After we were done with that, he decided to lay down in the shallow water and pretend to swim.  I thought that was a pretty big step because he was insisting on keeping his feet on the bottom up to that point.

By that afternoon, Nathaniel started jumping again, but started walking deeper and deeper until he couldn't touch.  Then, he lifted his feet up and started kicking and paddling with his hands.


He continued swimming further and further. Eventually, he declared he was a fish. Then, he clarified his statement by declaring he was a minnow. He swam until he teeth were chattering and he was getting tired. In the video below he swam pretty far from his mommy to the dock declaring "the little fishy is coming out of the water."


Sadly, this was our second to last day, and the last day was filled with storms and heavy waves, so he never got to continue working on his mad swimming skills.

Check out more of his swimming/jumping photos here.

Christopher

Not Quite as Easy as One, Two, Pee

We've been taking a rather relaxed approach to potty training, but yesterday, Kristina read a bunch of material on potty training and declared that potty training will begin in earnest the next day.  She arrived home from work with a bunch of underwear and told Nathaniel he'd be wearing them the next day.  He was not thrilled.

This morning, Kristina popped out of bed at 6:45am when she started to hear Nathaniel make noise (just for the record, I was up at 4:50am and out of the house by 5:25am to run 16 miles).  For the rest of the day we tried to get him onto the toilet every 20 minutes or so (he would get a sticker or a piece of candy for his efforts).  Needless to say, we had a lot of ups and downs.

During his "nap" (he didn't really fall asleep).  I went to Sam's Club and bought a big bag of Dum Dum suckers (one of his favorite treats) to bribe...er...encourage him to go in the toilet.  After a few more failures, Kristina declared she was going to use the toilet and had earned herself a red sucker.  Well, not to be outdone, Nathaniel peed on the toilet to get his blue sucker. Not long after that, he returned to the toilet, pooped and got an orange sucker.  Unfortunately, we couldn't get him to pee before bed and put a diaper on him for overnight.

So, our efforts can be summarized by the following statistics: 3 pairs of wet undies, 2 pees in the potty, 2 poops in the potty, 2 rugs in the washing machine, 2 exhausted parents, 1 pair of shorts soaked and 1 long day.

We're hoping tomorrow will go smoother, but we made some headway today.

Christopher

Hello, this is Nathaniel Appelt

This morning while I was trying to get Nathaniel ready to head out for daycare, I noticed he only had five of his six precious fish.  I quickly realized he was missing yellow perch.  I asked him where yellow perch was, and he gave me several suggestions, but none of them panned out.  So, finally, I told him we'd have to look after we got back.

We headed upstairs to brush our teeth.  As soon as Nathaniel was done, he walked over to a shelf in his bedroom and grabbed the telephone his Aunt Stephanie gave him for Christmas.  He grabbed the handset and said, "Hello, this is Nathaniel Appelt."  After a brief pause he followed with, "we're looking for yellow perch."

Fortunately, just before we left, I grabbed my sandals and out popped yellow perch.  Problem solved!

Christopher

Father and Son Fishing Fun!

First of all, if you read the tag line for our blog, you'll note that this is a "haphazard account" of what's happening in our lives.  I'm hoping in the next few days to post several blogs to try to bring folks up to date on some things that have been going on since my last post...Kristina has been doing a much better job than I have.

So, when Kristina's family came to visit in June, Nathaniel's Aunt Laura bought him some realistic-looking freshwater fish toys (you can see him clutching them at the end of that blog post).  Well, he promptly learned their names, and they've been his constant companions ever since then.  You can imagine how excited he was to learn that we have five (yellow perch, largemouth bass, pumpkinseed, bluegill, and crappie) of the six fish in our lake in Minnesota (we don't have the same type of catfish, but we do have bullheads, which is fine with him).

Somehow (trust me, I didn't teach him this) he learned that we catch fish on a hook with a fishing rod.  So he started pretending sticks were fishing rods, and told me he was going to catch fish with his "blue" hook (not sure where that came from).  Needless to say, he was excited when we finally left for the lake last month.  He told me he was "going to catch all the fish in the lake."  He even brought the small fish/minnow net and fishing outfit his Grandma Cynthia gave him for his birthday (sadly the net didn't make it into the blog post showing the outfit).

Nathaniel was super excited to go fishing.  So the first chance we got, we headed down to the dock with one of the children's fishing rods his Grandpa Appelt got for the grandkids use.


After baiting up, we cast the line out and waited for the fish to bite.


We also had to learn how to reel in the line.


Fishing was quite slow that day, but our patience eventually paid off.  Nathaniel got to check one of the fish he wanted to see off his list, Largemouth Bass!


We also had a lesson on properly and carefully holding a largemouth bass.


I think that was the only fish we caught that day, but he was as patient as a 2.5 year old can be and generally stayed on task.  We eventually told him the fish were sleeping and told him we could fish again tomorrow.  So, he grudgingly agreed to go upstairs, but he held me to my word the next day.  While Kristina was in town, Nathaniel asked me to take him fishing again.  Unfortunately, because I didn't have a photographer handy, we didn't get photos of that experience.  However, since we fished for over an hour, we were still at it when Kristina came back, so she was able to get photographic evidence of our much more successful outing (consisting mostly of keepers).  As you can tell, Nathaniel was excited and proud.




Nathaniel got to add a couple more fish to his list.  He actually reeled in some yellow perch by himself while I did most of the heavy lifting with the keeper bluegills and the 1.5 lb bass that was WAY to strong for that rod and reel.  You might also note the net (from Grandma Cynthia) in the photo.  Nathaniel and I had a system down.  I'd take the fish off the hook and put it in his net.  Then, he would walk down the dock to the floating basket, which I would pull out and he'd (with help from me) dump the fish into the basket.   He LOVED it, and catching over a dozen fish in an hour kept us busy.  The next outing we learned more about the difference between "keepers" or "basket fish" and fish we throw back.

I don't think I can find words that adequately express how I felt to be out fishing on my favorite lake with my son, who was as enthusiastic about fishing as I was.  I'm guessing my dad might have some idea what that feels like.

You can find more photos of our fishing experiences together here.

Christopher