Lovely adventures at McDonough

I did something completely new and a little scary yesterday, I held a pretty big spider crab. I'm ok with the smaller crabs because they are tiny but the big crabs are a bit scary to me. When we are at McDonough a lot more crabs are caught so all the kids get really excited and it is cute to watch. The touch tank gets filled with crabs fairly quickly and there is always a circle of kids around it naming the different crabs and wanting to check all of them to see if they are pregnant. There is this one girl that is younger than most of the kids that gets really happy when we arrive and bummed when we have to leave. She saw that one of the female crabs were moving around a lot and decided to name her Feisty Woman. This made her determined to catch a crab since everyone was catching crabs. Close to an hour went by of going to different places on the dock so she could catch something until she did; once she did she was beyond excited. Filled with joy she ran around the dock telling everyone she caught a crab. This will forever be one of my favorite moments of working with these kids.



I really enjoy going to McDonough because the kids immediately line up to use the nets and fishing rods. Almost all of them already know how to use them and those who don't just ask the ones who do. All the kids are so eager to pull up the crab traps that we have there. I say crab traps, plural, because the other day they found one from a year ago so we leave that one  down until we get there the next day. I also like going out to check the lobster traps because, like everything else, this is new to me. It is cool to get on the little motor boat out to where the traps are. The traps are a little on the heavy side but I can still handle pulling it up on my own. Actually today we caught 4 lobsters in the traps but we let go of one because it was a little small. This got all the kids really excited and they all surrounded them wanting to touch them.