Family Fishing!

On Saturday, we had planned to attend our first event with Children's Cancer Partners of the Carolinas: their annual fishing day! We looked forward to meeting some other children experiencing cancer and their families. Our oncologist had said Tom could attend if he had good numbers but, unfortunately, his ANC being 200 definitely did not qualify for his being allowed in a crowd, even outdoors with masks and social distancing.

So, we decided to go fishing ourselves! John bought Thomas his own kid-sized fishing pole and gave it to him one day early as a birthday gift. Look at those early morning smiles!

Right after breakfast (late by fishing standards!), we loaded up and drove to a nearby pond on a golf course. It's rather a hidden secret that a teenage fisherman friend let us in on years ago. This beautiful pond is located in the middle of a golf course in south Charlotte with easy parking and very few people (but many geese).

Unfortunately for us, there is construction going on just off the pond (to the left of this photo), such that the access sidewalk is gone and the dock is temporarily removed. We trekked down there in the humidity and circled the pond looking for a fishing spot out of the path of flying golf balls, but none were to be had. Thomas was too tuckered out to walk, so I carried all 40 pounds of him back up the slope to the car, which made for one sweaty and tired mama.

We drove back to the pond right across the main road from our neighborhood. Of course, no fish were biting by 10:00 a.m. and in such pounding heat, but we got to watch turtles and minnows.

It was a fun family morning and lessons were learned, such as it's really better to have only three kids fishing on the dock at once, not six. Might have been obvious to others ahead of time, but was not to us.

We came home and made Philly cheese steaks for lunch before Dad took all the kids swimming for an hour and a half so that I could put in some dedicated time making lesson plans for the fall. A dear and thoughtful family surprised us with a BBQ dinner so I was even able to take a 30-minute nap in the late afternoon instead of cooking. The insomnia is back big time, as are the cancer nightmares, so I'm tired these days.

It was a very sweet day for Thomas's Last Day of Being Four.