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