The end of March brought with it the march of time. My son’s birthday came around again and the number is starting to make me desperate to find the brakes. He turned a whopping seven this year, and his personality is really starting to shine through. 

For a while now, he has been sharing how much he wants to become a boat builder. With that in mind, his birthday presents included some books and tools for just such an inclination. I have a mess of a woodshop in our basement right now, which may one day get its own garage or shop, but he often asks me if we can make things from wood, and quickly follows that request with a specific proposal: to build a great cargo ship or cruise liner. Typically, I inform him that we lack the necessary materials for such an undertaking, to which he normally retorts that we have a good many trees on our property and that we should simply go chop them all down to make his boat.

We’ve made a few things on a far smaller scale than he would like, but hopefully, with a little guidance from his new books, we may be able to start something a tad more ambitious, although it may still lack the ability to transport elephants, which is what I’m sure he would prefer. 

I don’t like the idea of him getting older. I feel like I can’t enjoy him enough with the time we have, but to make the most of the time right now, we used his birthday as an excuse to explore his passions just a little bit more. I did a search for boat museums in the area, and while there are a few places with a few boats of one kind or another, we settled on the Finger Lakes Boating Museum in Hammondsport, NY. It’s right at the southern tip of Lake Keuka and packs a lot of good food and even another destination, the Glenn Curtiss Museum, which we’ll have to go back another time to see. (Spoiler: That museum has several old aircraft and vintage motorcycles.)

The boat museum, however, filled several hours with fun for our little troop and was enjoyable for all of us, let alone my future boat-builder. It’s set up in an old wine factory, which even has a basement with 10-foot-tall barrels—still there—that you can walk through. The main building had three floors, and there was an additional building with two warehouse-sized rooms filled with vintage boats and motors and oars galore. You could walk right up and touch nearly anything in the place, and there was even a workshop where they restored old boats that will eventually be added to the museum.

For the little guys, there was a room dedicated to aspiring boat builders where they could craft a wooden boat from pre-made pieces and take it home as a souvenir. 

If you’ve never heard of it, I would highly recommend this place as it was not only interesting to our family, but brimmed with the passion of its curators for the growing collection within its walls. 

Having taken pictures of many of the boats, my son went immediately to work, drawing his favorite one on a restaurant tablemat and planning what we would be attempting to build when we got home.

One problem I have never experienced is a lack of interesting things to engage in. I feel a little better knowing my sons are likewise inspired by the fascinating crafts and ideas around them. We work a lot as a family, and maybe this will be what my son chooses to pursue as a career, but for me, this was simply a perfectly spent day, whether this dream passes him by or becomes the vessel for his aspirations. 

The way out here, we share what we love with our children, but we explore what they discover in hopes of finding the things they will come to love as well. I would be tickled if both my boys stuck around to farm and grow my business with me. But their place at home will never go away, regardless of the adventures they chase. Perhaps one day they’ll take their old man out on a sleek new boat, cruising and fishing, and enjoying even more of this amazing, colorful world our Heavenly Father made for us to explore.

Note from the author: For those curious about how we did during maple season, we boiled around 300 gallons of sap and ended up with around six gallons of syrup over the course of four weeks. I had a lot of folks ask, so perhaps some of my readers wanted to know as well☺.