An Adventure with Cousins

I am a very lucky girl. How many people have cousins that come for week long visits? Not many. But I do! Granted, they live in Massachusetts, and this is the first time they ever visited us, but still, it was a wonderful experience.

Unfortunately, we could not find any time while they were with us to write a post for this blog, so I apologize for our absence. Nonetheless, we thought it would be fun to tell you a little about some of the things we did with them.

Our cousins liked the farm. Though it was a little bit of a surprise for them when they were feeding the chickens to accidentally get shocked by the electric fence! We told them to be careful but it still happened. But they weren’t upset by it! In fact they thought it was so funny that they did it again! (note from Mrs Brown: don’t worry moms, it’s a very brief electrical pulse! It’s sort of a farm right-of-passage. But still… crazy kids!)

We played with the cats, who are so cute. And being from Massachusetts, seeing the Texas wildflowers in bloom was very special. They liked picking them. Everyone seemed to like catching lizards and that became a common activity.

One day while they were here we went to the Nature Center in Austin. It was really cool to look at all the pretty flowers and cute little animals. And it was nice just to be in nature, under the trees.

That afternoon we went to the Jourdan Bachmann Pioneer Farm. They had some demonstrations that had just ended as we got there. We were kind of sad about that at first, but then along came this guy in sooty pants, and he was the blacksmith! The person at the front where we had paid had told him that we were going to look for him and he had come back all that way just for us. It was very nice, and we got to watch him make a meat hook.

Once we were done with that, we went around and looked at all the other things there, patted some donkeys, examined pioneer houses (with traditional crafts!) and played in a Tonkawa settlement. It was really cool to play in tipis and pretend to cook food over a fire.

Another day we went roller skating. It was fun and I didn’t get any blisters! My poor cousin ripped her pants because she fell down so much.

On Saturday we went to a homeschool track meet to watch my brother Caeleb run. During the meet they did a free-for-all race. They separated it by age and I got second place out of all the 11 year olds. But that’s not saying much because there were only three of us!

On the 16U 200 meter dash there were about 3 million people who wanted to race! 😉 And of course they couldn’t race them all at the same time, so they split them up into heats of about 7 or 8 people. One heat only had 2 people and they were about the same age. They were on the same team as each other and they looked like they were friends. One of them kept looking over at the other while they were running. When I thought back about it afterwards I think he was actually talking to his friend, because half way through the race they both turned around and started running backward! That was a fun fun track meet!

Around the middle of the track meet we decided to take a drive around town for a little while, while we were waiting for Caeleb to start his race. We found a really pretty little river with waterfalls and rapids. We played there for a while skipping stones, which I only managed to do about three times. My cousins were pretty good though, just about every rock they threw skipped!

The last day they were here we decided to make the most we possibly could of our time together. So we went kayaking down a river! I’d been in a canoe before and it was kind of difficult to maneuver but the kayak was so easy! The paddle was double sided which made it a lot less tiring to go forward and change directions. My cousin and I found lots of turtles on the banks of the river. And she even touched one!

We said goodbye at my uncle’s frozen yogurt store before they went to the airport. Of course we ate yogurt first!

I had a really fabulous time with my cousins and I hope they come again some day!