Life With Kids...

I don't know if you knew this about me, but I am an award-winning blogger. If you only know me from this blog you are probably thinking I am talking crazy, which I have been known to do. But my previous blog, Chaotic Kids & Clutter, which you can still read by going here, won the Best Kept Secret Blog Award at the 2014 International Bloggie Awards. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but that awards says that, at least in 2014, my blog was the best blog in the whole wide world that nobody had heard of. That's pretty cool, if you ask me.

I stopped writing on Chaotic Kids & Clutter a couple of years ago, mostly because of all the comments I got on it from dirty old men about my kids. As you can imagine, comments like those have a way of eating at your soul and making you want to stop writing about your home life, even if your home life may be filled with funny happenings that occur on an hourly basis. Oh well, as my above-mentioned award would indicate, nobody was reading that blog any way.

My four kids and their cousin. My kids are the ones that all look alike...

I write all this for one purpose only: to mention that I have a lot of kids! Four, to be exact. I know that because I counted them all before I left the house this morning... The oldest is now 10, and although I have taken her out into the yard to practice some fly casting once or twice before, she really seems like she might actually be getting excited to learn more about it. A friend gave us some waders that fit her perfectly, and a few nights ago she came down into my fly tying room to look over my fly rods with me. She found a particularly nice 6-foot-long rod and expressed her desire to use a short rod like that, since she is so much smaller than me.

I thought to myself, "Self, that is fine and all, but you don't really want her to use that particularly nice rod, do you?!?!"

"NO!!!", my self screamed back. So I got a new rod. A rod that she, and any of my other kids who might want to, can use and beat up as much as they want.

It's an Eagle Claw Featherlight glass rod. It's 6'6" in length, and rated for a 3 or 4 weight line. We took it out in the yard last night and gave it a whirl. It definitely seems like a 4wt to me, and I am not just saying that because I happened to have a 4wt line I was going to give them...

I paired the new rod with an old Daiwa 730, the best, cheap, old reel you can find for a 4wt rod.

For being the most inexpensive fly rod you can find, it really casts quite nicely. I was able to wow my kids by putting pinpoint casts pretty much anywhere I was aiming. Both the oldest child and her brother were quickly getting the hang of it and laying out nice loops, as long as they didn't have more than 15-20 feet of line out. I think it will be a perfect rod for the kids to learn on. And if they forget my guidance and end up breaking the tip off by jamming it into the ground while walking around with it , I think it will only cause some minor tears on my part. That might seem like hyperbole, but even though it's cheap, it is still a fly rod...