Nephew Visits to the Homestead

Sorry for all the photos at once but I wanted you all to see how much fun we had over the past two weeks! My middle nephew visited by himself the first week. He’s the one that I took blueberry picking in this post. He’s also the one in the photos above with the sunfish and then the load of basil. He wasn’t impressed when I told him we were eating all that basil! Just kidding! We ended up dehydrating all that basil. I do need to make one more round of basil ice cream though. And we’re using some in the tomatoes we’re canning. But that’s for a different blog post. We did make Rocky Road ice cream that week and boy was it yummy! We went fishing every day and went to the pool every day. And picked blueberries. This nephew wanted to just hang out at the fishing lodge and be super low key. Which was totally fine with us!

The other two nephews visited us last week. We pretty much did the same thing as the week before except we did run to town one day with the youngest nephew (the oldest nephew was busy helping out on the property. More about that in a minute). The Mister had the boys help him drill rivets in the boat seat (I have no idea what any of that means, but that’s what they were doing). You can see how hard it was to actually put the rivets in by the look of my oldest nephew’s face above! The youngest one got to help drill the hole while the oldest one put the rivets in. And then, uh oh! They couldn’t open the cover to the seat!

We had some pool time and some fishing time, both on the river and on the pond. I think they really had a good time. Then the two nephews wanted to go to Hibachi. They heard their brother got to go when we were in Virginia picking him up and they weren’t going to be left out! So I took them to hibachi on Friday. They loved it! They loved the show, the Shirley Temples with umbrellas, and the food! I was super impressed. My brother is a super picky eater as is my middle nephew. So I wasn’t sure what to expect with these two. For the most part they were not picky at all. Especially when we made Moose Tracks ice cream. They weren’t picky about that. At all!

So my oldest nephew is really into hunting. He shot his first deer last year. That’s one thing I wish we did more of here. I think hunting is the most self-sufficient way to provide meat for the homestead. And our deer population here is out of control. I think hunting is a good way to help with conservation if done responsibly. But I won’t go into that here. I know there are people who are totally against hunting but we are not one of those people. Needless to say though my oldest nephew is a hunter. So when it came time to do some conservation work in the woods, he was all over it. He spent the majority of one day helping do all kinds of cool, fun things in the woods. And he even got to drive the tractor. The same tractor that took my the better part of 2 years to finally learn how to drive! He didn’t think that was any big deal!

Overall I think the nephew visits were a success as is evidenced by this face: