Glewwe Kids: October 2016

Soccer season - Owen's on the red team.

Reuben enjoys watching the games.

Ready and waiting...

We're still working away at breaking up these slabs of colored concrete!

Reuben and Matt work on filling the gabion wall frames.

Owen's two friends will occasionally take turns smashing.

Lovely day to be outside.

Gloria Rae

We got free tickets to the Children's Theater, so Leah, Reuben, Rinnah, Gloria and I went to see Elephant and Piggie's "We are in a Play!"

Reuben was thrilled with the show (and the girls enjoyed it, too), but it put Gloria to sleep. ;)

Time to dig potatoes!

It's always a jungle back there by this time of year. Kind of nice to have a reason to dig it all up and bury it with snow for a few months!

Only a few of our pumpkin vines made it, but the ones that did gave us a few cute pie pumpkins!

Our home school group got a private 3 hour tour of the Dodge Nature Center near our house. This is at a rough playground area.

Trees to climb up, low ropes course type things - they would have been happy here all afternoon, I think!

After visiting the chickens, the horses, and the big old ugly pig, we got to go up into the hayloft, and although the bales were piled too high for them to climb on the actual bales, they WERE allowed to jump in this bin of loose hay. You can tell it was kind of dusty!

Back outside, Reuben snuggled down next to big brother Owen.

And when Rinnah got tired, Leah was there to help her out!

Rinnah's pictograph of the number of apple seeds in a few days' worth of apples around our house.

Leah's hair was really pretty and wavy after being in a bun all day.

Hey, spunky girl!

Krassimir and Evania playing on the slides.

Gloria is nursing while holding onto Evania's head.

Rinnah playing soccer!

This is an especially deceiving action shot.

Owen, number 48, made his goal of actually scoring a goal this season, and not just assisting (which he does a fair amount of.)

Reuben, seeing the camera, climbed off my lap to pose. I have three shots almost identical to this one as he climbed off three times to pose for me!

This tree is amazing every year - it looks like it's glowing with its own light!

We had the perfect combination of good weather, enough leaves down, and Daddy with *just* enough time to come out with us that made for a special morning.

The purpose of the day was not so much to rake leaves, but to gather leaves to jump in!

Rake, rake, rake.

Play, play, play.

Posing in the leaves.

The only sad part is that Krassi was at school, so he didn't get to be out with us!

Leah's hauling the little girls sitting on piles of leaves to add to the BIG pile.

Reuben, armed and dangerous.

Leah and Rinnah worked together to do my hair today.

Another "seize the day" opportunity. We love to go to Highland Park in the spring and fall when we can wear long pants and sleeves because these two tube slides are SOOOOO big that you get slide burn going down if you aren't covered!

This gives you some idea. It's really, really high up there.

And from the playground is a pedestrian bridge that's similarly REALLY high above the road. Reuben would have sat here the whole time if I could have trusted him to stay put! But Krassi needed me back by the slides, so I couldn't leave Reuben here.

Owen can climb UP the slides! At least the smaller one.

When I was off on the bridge with Reuben, I came back to find Leah carrying Krassimir up the stairs so he could slide again. She's not that much bigger than he is, so it was slow going, but she was making progress!!

Static

Sitting way up at the top.

And Owen and Rin

Krassi liked this little tube that went just between two levels and not all the way down to the ground.

Wooly Bear

Owen's bank, a half mile from our house, has a "free pumpkins, cider, and donuts" day every October. We ALL walked down on this beautiful Saturday. Owen helped Leah all the way with her Rollerblades.

Krassi's loaded up with pumpkins, and Evania's working on her cider.

Cool Bulgarian bumper sticker for Big Blue! Looks like I'll need to get a closer shot. We've got a ways to go before the back of the van is as cool as when we got it, but we figure we'll just keep looking for bumper stickers whenever we go somewhere of interest, and eventually we'll get there!

More great weather, so we did a bonfire and tent-in-the-yard night. Mom, Gloria, and Krassi got to sleep in the house. Owen did, too, after being woken at midnight by Reuben having seizures, and Reuben ended the night in bed with me and his rescue meds, but Matt and the three big girls toughed it out all night!

Gloria in a pretty hand me down from the girls' best friend.

Driveway day! As much as we love our gravel, blacktop is much more practical for a family with wheelchairs, so blacktop it is.

More than the process itself, I enjoyed watching all of the people watching the progress!

Like father, like daughters

This was a good year to make a trip up to the North Shore, and since Bobby and Krista (and Joy!) live on the way, we stopped to see them! All sorts of girly cousins playing here - half of my grandparents' ten great-grand-daughters.

Leah and Rinnah noticed right away that the river, as it flows into Lake Superior, looks like a horse!

Gooseberry Falls is simply spectacular - free access, easy access (from a rest stop), and incredible landscape AND, best of all, you can climb all over it!

You're RIGHT THERE at the falls. Nothing but your own discretion keeps you out.

Being along the North Shore always fills me with a greater understanding of what it means to say that we live on a rocky planet.

Rinnah leaping over little rivulets in the rock.

Death grips on Evania and Reuben.

Krassi at the Falls. He really didn't' get into it so much. He's only smiling because he likes to pose for the camera!

Can you find Owen??

Leah, scrambling over rocks

Reuben reaching down to find another rock to throw in

Leah enjoyed helping Evania navigate the rougher terrain.

Another "find Owen" photo.

Owen and Leah found this neat formation and wanted to photograph it.

Back by the Falls.

Peek a boo, Gloria!

Although we saw VERY few other people while on our adventures, we DID run into someone at the perfect moment to snap a photo of all of us before we started walking back to the van.

We really are RIGHT on the edge here. It's a good 20' or more drop just 4-5' away from us. But it's SO cool. We had taken the stairs up, and were waiting, and waiting, and waiting for Matt and Krassi to come up the zig-zag path, and finally realized we had gone up TWO tiers, and not the one that we'd come in on, so that explained why it was taking Dad so long! But it was nice to get the top-down view.

No idea what this statue is of. Leah took the photo!

The next day we hiked along the shore under Split Rock lighthouse. We probably traversed at least a half mile along the rough, rocky shoreline.

Evania would have none of smiling. But she was quite game for the whole adventure, and enthralled with the lighthouse.

A "Krassi at Split Rock" photo for him to share with his school class.

This is a little puddle of water Krassi found while Daddy was taking the photo above!

This trip was partly for Rinnah - Owen got to visit the North Shore with Grandma and Papa (Glewwe) when he was in kindergarten, and we went for just one night when Leah was a kindergartener. (See those photos here.)

This is how we hiked along the shore. Daddy carried Krassi, and held either Reuben or 'Vania's hand, and I had Gloria on my back and held the other hand-dependent one.

This is what Krassimir's wheelchair did while we were hiking. There are nice gravel paths to get right down to the shore, but on the shore itself, it's totally wild.

Real life rock climbing. It was neat to see Reuben doing this, and Owen being ready to lend a hand at the top.

Owen got a few opportunities to forge on ahead, once he and Matt went REALLY far when the other kids and I were at a place that was easier to manage with just one adult.

Rinnah liked this weathered log.

Reuben found a delightful spot near the shoreline on a pile of smaller, tumbled rocks, just the right size for throwing. He would have been supremely happy here if he'd had his Bible along to set on his lap. Thankfully, though, he didn't, because every once in a while (and once soon after this photo was taken!) a bigger wave made it up that high - he and Owen were soaked! Reuben's lap was just full of water!

Beautiful, tiny little fairy gardens growing between the rocks.

We hiked up a different trail than we went down, and Daddy and Owen ran down the path to bring Krassi's chair up from the other access point while we waited on this huge rock up on the path.

What a trooper.

A funny shot inside the museum at the light house grounds. The nice thing about coming at the off season is that this visitor center was free to get into! The lighthouse itself was closed, but they could still walk right up to it. For our crew, this was enough.

That afternoon Owen, Leah, Reuben, and Rinnah went agate hunting near some of the streams that run into the Lake while I stayed back at the hotel so Gloria and Evania could nap and Krassi could have some time just down on the floor.

Outside our train hotel.

Walking around in Duluth we found a fun photo-opp.

There's Leah...

...and Owen...

...and Evania, keeping her no-smiling-for-the-camera record clean.

And Gloria - far and away the cutest of the whole bunch. ;)

The maritime museum is also free, and Reuben, despite a rougher night and morning with seizures, was quite engaged with watching the water and the cars going over the lift bridge.