I know that these are supposed to be of me, ice fishing. But I was shocked to find that I am losing my hair and thought that the rest of you might want to know so you can buy me hats.


So, ice fishing. First, you get your friend Tom to drill a big hole in the ice. Then, you make some very hilarious jokes about how this or that thing augurs well for our fishing fortunes. Then you get a blank stare from other ice fishermen.



Next, you scoop out the icy bits and chase off the ice-eating dogs.


Next, you set up these little traps. The flag pops up when a fish bites. That occurs once every, um, time you go ice fishing. Maybe.


Then, after sitting still for two hours, you fry a lot of cholesterol-laden things and eat breakfast. Beer freezes and must be defrosted by the Coleman stove. The black box is a contraption Tom built. You tow it with a very fun 4-wheeler thing.


Eventually, you catch a very small fish, throw it back, and go home. If you are lucky, Tom lets you drive his 4-wheeler on the way back in. It has a place to hold a can of beer. Now that is good vehicle design.

Grandpa Mark came for a short visit - by now, I think it was about 3 weeks ago, and Max was soooooo into him. See how engaged Max is?




Here's Max looking a little more...something... stunned? Grandpa David, in town to celebrate Christmas, which, yes, was 3 weeks ago, is intent on simply not dropping the baby. We have dropped the baby, and he came out of it fine. But any of you who have grandpas handling your kids know that you really need to keep the fear of God in 'em or they lose focus. And that's when people get hurt.





Here's our Christmas Day activity: a walk up the nearby hill in the Arnold Arboretum. The tiny man in the brightly colored Klan hood is not capable of remaining awake on such a long walk. Later in this journey he perked up in time to show off his glasses for a passerby who stopped us to talk about her son's glasses (he's 17 years old). We had almost escaped when she casually mentioned that when he was 3 - that was in 1992 - he had gone to the hospital and needed to take some medicine rectally. We are now more focused than ever on getting in and out of the Arboretum without hearing about anyone's rectum.





Not much going on here except that Max has been captured on film while smiling. Normally the digital camera delay means that we get photos of him intently focused on the camera. Not here.





Recently, we gave Max a "teething biscuit." A teething biscuit is an almost entirely unflavored cookie that is baked in such a way that it is shatterproof. Instead, it simply melts in the baby's mouth. Can't choke on slimy crumbs! Max began his exploration of the biscuit with a cold hard staredown.






It wasn't long, though, before he jammed it in his mouth and entered a trancelike state in which it was just him and the biscuit. The gnawing was intense. Note the pasty glop pooling around his mouth. When dry, this glop becomes a sort of chitinous exoskeleton that prevents would-be predators from eating, maiming, or, in our case, washing the face of the baby. Fun stuff.



It was not long before the entirety of the cookie was transfered to his face. We considered giving him a post-breakfast bath, but you can't just go solving every problem with a bath, or you'll never get to Maine. Oh, right - we were headed to Maine to visit our good friends Gen and Tom. In our next installment: Dan goes ice fishing!