You Can't Make 'Em Like it
Posted by Pete Robbins on Oct 28th 2019
Even though I don’t have any of my own, as a general rule I like kids — in limited doses — but there’s one group of ankle-biters I actively dislike: The ones that eat only chicken fingers and macaroni and cheese.
Actually, it’s probably not fair to hold them accountable. Except in what I assume are extremely isolated cases of extra-sensitive taste buds or balky stomachs, the exclusive chicken-n-mac diet is likely a failure of parenthood. Either the parents are too lazy to make anything else, or too spineless to push their young’uns to sample different things. If they take a bite of sushi or steak or broccoli or onion soup and then determine that they don’t like it, I can live with that, but refusal to try is just lame.
So I can’t really blame my nephew for not liking fishing. He tried it. It apparently wasn’t his jam. He moved on.
As of last Friday, he’d not caught a fish of any kind, which would make him persona non grata in the jig-and-minnow triangle of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Twenty four hours later he’d caught his first fish, a 46” musky, which would make him the envy of most of those same people. It was a gorgeous fish, it fought valiantly, and with a little help young Tai Robbins subdued it.
And then he went back to playing Madden on his dad’s phone.
Which he much preferred.
But at least he tried.
He also tried his first Ho-Ho, and his first Pop Tart, which likely did not endear me to his health food loving mother as much as the rest of the day’s experience. He liked those much better than fishing. Sometimes trying expands your horizons, sometimes it does not.
