My oldest son Colby left for college this past fall, and even though he’s only about an hour away in Laramie, it’s still nearly impossible to get him to come home to visit.
I’ve tried to threaten him into coming home by telling him if he doesn’t come home more often, his younger brother Logan is going to steal his basement room, but that hasn’t seemed to make a difference. We’ve tried going over to Laramie to visit him, and to take him to Cowboys football and volleyball games, but when we show up at the games, he disappears to go sit on the other side of the stadium or the arena with his friends.
So I’ve resorted to bribing him. And it turns out the best methods for bribery have to do with hunting or shooting.
I bribed him into a weekend deer hunt earlier in the fall, and that worked out pretty well. We didn’t get any deer – heck, we didn’t even see any – but we had a chance to catch up and visit with each other. But now I’m running out of bait. He doesn’t share my passion for waterfowl hunting, so I don’t think a duck hunt is going to do the trick to get him to come over the hill. And we no longer have a bird dog, so neither of us is all that excited about going pheasant hunting.
So this past weekend, on Saturday, Logan and I went out to the backyard range and blew up a bunch of pumpkins with Tannerite. We filmed the excursion and sent the video to Colby. He immediately sent a message back asking if we had any pumpkins left. Bingo.
I thought he was going to say he’d come home the following weekend, but instead, he said, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Mission accomplished. Now I need to go find some more pumpkins so he’ll come home again next weekend.
