Bobbi's job

 Just over five years ago I posted about how Bobbi had gotten her first "real" job (as in, not just a temporary summer job.) As we had hoped, it was a great fit for her. Last month marked her five-year anniversary with Kwik Trip as a Food Product Demonstrator (FPD)! She has gotten to know many of the "regulars" and they will come in looking for her. She's seen co-workers come and go, some because they were just looking for temporary work, and some because they've been moved to other positions or other stores within the company. She takes pride in being someone who sticks it out even on the tough days (and she's had days she's told us she's ready to call it quits, and the *only* thing keeping her from following through is that she doesn't want to be the one who just leaves!) Besides, it's nice getting a regular paycheck. 😉

For over a year she's been working with another agency that works with people with disabilities in job placement, not because she wants to leave Kwik Trip, but because she's been hoping to work closer to 30 hours a week instead of just the 15-20 that she was currently getting. That's been slow going. She is very uncomfortable with anything having to do with numbers, so anything that involves cashiering is out. Yikes! That *greatly* reduces her options. She can't carry things, so stocking shelves isn't an option. Her cognitive limitations make something like answering phones and directing calls beyond her. So, although she's a very personable young woman, with a definitely range of skills, they just don't overlap in areas that are easily marketable. Greeting guests and passing out samples is a great fit for her.

So it was pretty hard hitting when she learned a few weeks ago that Kwik Trip is dropping, company-wide, their food product sampling program. They intend to keep all of the current product demonstrators on in other positions, but mainly in jobs that Bobbi can't do! We're so grateful that her store manager is motivated to keep someone with Bobbi's company loyalty in the company. So, while she's not going to keep 15-20 hours, she DOES still get to work three 3-hour shifts a week putting price stickers onto muffins and crisp rice bars and doing some light cleaning of the surfaces that she is able to reach.

Here's Bobbi wiping the counters by the coffee machines.

However, the week after she learned about her FPD position going away, she actually had an interview for a similar position with Sam's Club! Her FIRST interview after over a year long process of looking! 

And she bombed it. Oof. That was a pretty big downer to her. She also has not learned to see the hand of God at work in the coincidences of timing the same way Matt and I have had over the years., which made the blow even harder to take.

What a joy to, a few weeks later, see the same position open again; she applied, and got another interview! She related afterward that the (same) interviewer was surprised to see her trying again, and told her that she admired her persistence, and was going to give her one shift a week and see how it goes, with the potential of picking up another shift if it works out well for everyone!

So, before her FPD job at Kwik Trip ended and she was down to 9 hours a week, she had officially gotten a second job. While she has not started there yet, she has been hired! What beautiful provision for her. 

And, unrelatedly, she got her ears pierced a second time. 

Leah's track meet

Leah's running on the track team this year (as a senior, having never done it before, but close to 70% of the senior class decided to join track to get one last hurrah together!) and it just happened that the one meet closest to our house also happened to be the most gorgeous day, so we *all* went. (Even Owen showed up at the beginning and overlapped with some of us, though had to leave before Leah ran.)

Krassi does NOT look thrilled at this moment, but in general he was having a pretty good time and enjoyed the cheering. Mira is next to him, shaded from the sun by the bag we have her suction machine in. Bobbi was there only because Matt had to run mid-way to pick her up from work, but she stayed in the van...

Leah's by no means a track star, but she did run a personal best in the 800 meter with us all there cheering her on! 

Getting the whole crew out for any event is daunting, but days like this make it so worth while, and I know it means a lot to Leah to have the whole family there. :)

A bunch of us with my cousin, who's the coach for one of the other teams. (Dad and Bobbi hadn't arrived yet, and Mira and Krassi are still behind the wall.)

Bobbi's hair

 Guess who's been growing out her lovely, dark, curly hair to be long enough to donate? BOBBI! My crazy girl who, eight years ago in the hotel in Bulgaria was asking me, via google translate, how soon she could get a SHORT hair cut when we got to the US! :) She's been wearing it all tucked up in back so it doesn't look that long, but it is!

This photo is from back in mid November...

Her hair is so thick - she's been only growing out the top, keeping the bottom half shaved/trimmed, but there was still enough to pull off four nice braids' worth of hair when we went in to get her hair cut today!

Pretty neat to be able to grow hair that beautiful and to be able to give it away for someone else to enjoy!

Sheathing and roof framing

It's Ebenezer!!! This stage of the project where you can run in and out of the windows is super fun.The design of the garage was deliberately low and sunk into the ground on the east and north sides to minimize the impact of this big thing in our yard, which means the window sills are quite close to grade on the outside. We were also able to reuse four of the windows from the old garage (including the one that will go here) which is one more little way to save money!

Kids in the window, of course (this one does NOT have a low sill!) But the biggest thing to notice in this picture is the roof joists up on the attic storage space!

And here Matt and Korey are lifting up, one by one, the joists for the longer east side of the garage.

Here you can see the little windows Eben was posing in earlier, as well as the big ridge beam that the joists are resting on. That one's not as big as my favorite one, but still rather impressive.

Another big part of construction is keeping the job site clean! This is a great job for the small crew. Eben's wheelbarrow is NOT just a toy!

Here Rinnah is helping Reuben pick up little bits outside.

This is my view from the top of the stairs in the existing house, looking over the flat roof of the mudroom/entry to Gavin working on sheathing the front peak of the garage.

I remember distinctly that this photo was taken on one of the Thursdays when we invited the crew in for pancakes for lunch. Eben challenged Gavin to eat 20 pancakes, but he stopped at just 10. When we came back out, there was a racoon up in the big tree!! Big day. But you can see that the sheathing is done and house-wrap is going on! Matt is happy he doesn't have to do that part. He does not love being up high on ladders with big sheets or rolls of things.

Another piece of helping - Rinnah is going for a walk with Bobbi so Dad can keep working. And what a lovely day for a walk, too! Bobbi still doesn't prefer her walker for general moving around, but it's a great form of exercise!

Ooh! Look at that! All the roof joists on, and sheathing is starting to go up on the long east side of the roof!

And a view from the back. Again, the flat roof portion on the right is where the ramp comes. The gabled part is the garage proper, with the attic storage space off-center, both to mirror the off-center peak of the 2013 addition and also to let us get the height we need for Thunder while still keeping the roof edge on the yard side nice and low (I can reach up and touch the soffit!)

Over the weekend, Bobbi took advantage of the big open space of the garage and did her 40 minute walk in circles around the garage! :D

Evania and Eben were teasing a little and throwing leaves down on her from the attic space (which doesn't have its knee wall yet, so is *completely* open! Yikes! The kids climb in and out of the space currently by taking a ladder up to the flat roof (or climbing through that aforementioned window at the top of the stairs in the original house!) and then in through the back attic window where the flat roof portion wraps around the garage (see that two photos back).

The requested "little update"

 To my dear "Unknown" blog reader who is periodically, politely, and patiently requesting an update, here's an attempt at just that!

I'll begin with Krassimir - Krassi continues to excel at contentedly managing his time. He continues to live an extremely limited life due to his physical and cognitive disabilities, BUT he has the incredible skill of being satisfied with what he CAN do. He's still a generally happy guy, and though he generally spends his time on the floor of Mira's room/the computer room (centrally located, close to the toy shelf, and a big-ish open floor), he will some days decide to spend stretches of time in the upholstered chair in the dining room (he can climb up into it by himself and down out of it.) He'll drag a few choice toys of the day with him, and sit there happily for hours. Some days he pulls himself out to the living room, and some days he still likes to get himself down to the basement and play there. (But we had some water damage this spring when the GFCI on the sump pump went out...so it's a bit of a mess as we're replacing the bottom 8" of insulation and drywall!)

I think I've posted about this before, but I continue to be delighted with the variety within a theme of the toys he selects. He still loves rings and triangles, and squishy animal toys of the right size.

Four rings and a squishy pig. Do you love how pleased he is that I'm taking a photo of his creation? :)

Four rolls of duct tape up his arm!

I love this one because you can see his thought process. This is very typical - he starts the day making his selection, and then that's the one he'll drag around all the rest of the day. On this particular day he's got a squishy lamb inside of a square "ring" inside of a larger ring on top of a squishy circle. The horse and three rolls of duct tape didn't make the cut on this particular day.

Today we've got TWO rolls of duct tape, each with a squishy farm animal inside, as well as a donut patterned scrunchie Rinnah made for him. (She made donut pajama pants or shorts for everyone in the family that wears pajama pants, but then used the same fabric to make a scrunchie for Krassi's wrist, a lap blanket for Mira, and she backed a blue satin blanket for Reuben, as none of them wear typical pajama pants.)

This one makes me laugh. The ring of choice is a dog chew toy that we got him for his birthday one year. He loves it. A stuffed ferret is the squishy animal, and they're riding on top of one of Eben's monster trucks!

Krassi stacked this himself. He was really proud of getting five up there! Because you can't tell by looking, I'll let you know that both the bottom blue block and the yellow one count as "rings" in Krassi's world because they have holes in the center that squishy animals (or triangles) can go into. Here you can also see the green foam triangle that is one of his favorites.

I've been collecting these photos of his assemblages regularly since 2021, though I have a photo from as far back as 2017 with a similar theme. They are a great example of his distinct preferences, as well as his creativity, and his categorization skills. Rings, triangles, and squishy animals are his thing, but the vast range of combinations he can make, and the deliberate way he goes about choosing them is truly delightful. On the one hand, it doesn't seem like much of a life for a 20 year old, but on the other hand, he's content in it, and takes pride in his work! What more could you ask? 

Next up is Tsvetomira. Tsvetomira continues to spend her days working hard at breathing, digesting, and voiding. We had a few years of kind of a sweet spot, but over the last year, have been chasing just general unrest in her that cycles on and off a few days at a time. Last fall she had three separate week long hospital stays, over the course of which they tried all sorts of things - antibiotics for an ear infection (no results), x-rays of every bone in her body to rule out something broken that might be causing pain (everything looked good), etc, etc. They finally did a contrast study of her G-I tract over the third stay and found a small ulcer in her esophagus. That almost overnight resulted in a long stretch of being "good." We continue to treat with an antacid - quite benign compared to some of her other meds. But the last few weeks she's been cycling through days of just not being settled, and no good way of figuring out what it is that's bugging her. We're currently doing steady visits with her (fantastic) complex care doctor at Gillette every 4-6 weeks just to stay on top of things and try a few ideas. Keeping her comfortable is one of our major goals for Mira.

I still don't see any indication whatsoever that she can distinguish me or Matt or any of her siblings from anyone else. But what matters more to us is that she is surrounded by people who touch and care for her gently. She may not know that it's mommy who's touching her, but she notices that *someone* provides a gentle touch when she cries, even when we can't figure out anything to do about it.

Here she is with the donut lap blanket that provides cover and a buffer between her and her lap belt when she's in her chair. Notice the tight, uncomfortable way she's holding herself. :( While we do have many days when she's peaceful and looks at ease, we also get plenty of these looks. It's just hard work being Mira!

We still see her heart rate vacillating from as low as 38 (and then her body temperature tanks!) to as high as the 150s or 160s, often all in a day. She's always had a hard time regulating her body temperature, but seems to be having increasing trouble with it. Keeping her warm is a constant task. Except in the summer when it gets really hot, and then we have to take active steps to cool her down. We call her our little reptile!

And then Bogomila. Honestly, Bobbi is probably the biggest reason that I stopped blogging regularly. :) My desire with this blog was, among other things, to be able to recount the challenges and joys of adoption, and particularly the adoption of children with special needs, and to have an account of God's faithfulness through all of it. Because of Bobbi's significantly higher cognitive and developmental abilities as compared to Krassimir and Tsvetomira, the challenges, in particular, were not things we thought were things we needed to broadcast across the internet! And yet, ONLY describing the joys would provide a very incomplete, one-sided picture. So out of respect for Bobbi, we went quiet. :) So, knowing that I'm going to give you an incomplete one-sided picture - the "Christmas card" version, so to speak ;) - here's a lovely update of all the really good things going on in Bobbi's life!

Where to start? Because there's a lot more going on in her life than Krassi or Mira's! Well, she's still got the job that she began in the fall of 2020. When she first started, she was still in her transitional program with the school district, so was only working 9 hours a week. After she graduated, she had the opportunity to go up to 20 hours - a big increase - and she went for it, and has done really well. While she used to struggle with a 3 hour shift, she now has 5+ hour shifts that she pushes through even when she's sleepy. She has many regulars who know her work schedule, and come in every week (or more than once a week!) mostly just to talk with Bobbi. She gets along really well with her co-workers, and has a handful who are above-and-beyond helpful when the occasional situation arises when she needs that kind of extra help. She was just tickled to find out this week that her new-ish manager shares a birthday with her! Birthdays are a big deal in Bobbi's world, so for him to have HER birthday is a really big deal (though she's also confessed to me that she's a *little* jealous that it's not just her day anymore!)

She just wrapped up the first phase (took about 8 months) of something called "customized employment." They work with people with disabilities who have employable skills, but not necessarily the kind of skills and abilities that can easily find jobs through regular job postings. This first phase was the "discovery" phase, where her worker spent time getting to know her, interviewing people who know her, watching her do a variety of tasks, arranged a number of volunteer opportunities to observe her doing a range of different tasks, and ended with putting together a visual resume and a list of potential employers. The next phase, which we have not started yet, involves a different worker contacting her/our top choices on those lists, and working together to create a job description and position that meets their needs and Bobbi's abilities. She's really hoping to work for Delta and get airline miles as part of a dream to visit Bulgaria again sometime. We're just excited that she *wants* to get another job (she plans to also stay at Kwik Trip) and excited for her to push herself in this way and have more chances to get out of the house! We expect maybe by Christmas we'll have something to show for this long process.

Bobbi continues to steadily produce beautiful things with her colored pencils. She finds line drawings on the internet for me to print out, and then gets to work. She was also able to use her skills to color some half-size sheets for "Ten Plagues Bingo" game for vacation Bible school at our church. The woman who heads it all up was really pleased with how nice they look! Here are two recent examples of her work:

Lovely colors and a good example of her use of shadows and highlights

This is from a coloring book she got for Christmas. Again, the colors she uses are just beautiful and almost seem to glow and sparkle with light and depth.

She and I also just recently finished a project we'd been working on together for a long time - a quilt! It was kind of Dad's idea: a pixelated black and white version of her favorite Turkish music artist. We worked on it every Thursday night (a good reason to get her out of her room and interacting with me!) I did the cutting and sewing, and her job was to follow the chart I'd created, and tell me how many of each color pixels (9 colors ranging from white to black with seven shades between) in a row I needed to accurately create each column. We checked and double checked, and I only had to take out a few seams. She picked out a really fun bright fabric for the back, and we had a bit of a routine where every evening when we wrapped up our work, she had Leah use her dramatic flair to read a few of the phrases out loud. Bobbi laughs every time. :) I don't have a good picture of it currently, but will try to get one. Right now it's in a box waiting to get entered in the county fair next week!

She's also slowly added a handful of household chores to her routine. We now keep a bin for dirty towels in the bathroom instead of tossing them down the clothes chute with the other dirty laundry, and it's her job to 1) tell us when a load is ready to be washed (so we can carry the towels to the laundry room and fill the soap dispenser) 2) load the towels into the washer and start the machine, and 3) fold the towels after I've dried them and put them out in the living room at the project table. She's also started helping with the supper dishes. We do not have an automatic dishwasher, so the kids cycle through doing the washing three times a day. Bobbi is not able to do everything, but she does the (melamine) plates, (plastic) cups, and silverware, and usually a handful of other not-too-big-or-breakable items. One of the rest of us finishes up. Again, having these small, but routine and necessary tasks that she can do is so good. We regularly talk with our children about how work is what we as humans were created for. Work itself is not a curse - it's the futility of work that is. (We garden. Canadian thistles, anyone??? The more you dig, the more they grow - I feel like I'm fighting a hydra on steriods! That's futility!) All of the children know that this crazy house only works when we each pitch in our part. (Even Krassi is expected to put his toys away at the end of the day...and does it!)

Last thing I should probably mention, and I *might* blog about more regularly because it's fairly benign ;) and it's as good a place as any to keep a log of it, is that we're finally in a few weeks here beginning construction on what should be the final building project! We're tearing off the old garage (built without foundations and slowly sinking) and replacing it with a new garage (with foundations) AND....it will have an indoor ramp!!!...we are so ready to be able to get people in and out of the house single-handedly instead of needing to one- or two-person carry them in around a tight corner and up two stairs!

Remembering five years ago

 

A bit on Bobbi

 I'm grateful to all of you who have asked me to post. I've wanted to, but with the myriad of things waiting for my time, not everything gets done. :) But, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, right? And there's been enough of you "squeaking" to make this worth my time!

So, today is a little tidbit on Bobbi, who graduated from "Branch Out," which is our school district's transitional program for young adults with disabilities. She had quite an interesting tenure there, with all of the COVID lock downs and distance learning impacting much of her time there, but we made it through, and she had some beneficial experiences through her years there. She now has officially earned her high school diploma, and they had a nice, small graduation ceremony in the spring.

With Rose and one of her favorite paras.

Each student had a little framed description of themselves that they put together with their teacher for the back table to display next to their photo.We thought Bobbi's was pretty representative of who she is!

(She's making decent progress on her dreams, since Dad did get her ceiling fan installed soon after graduation! Maybe not the biggest of dreams, but achieved nonetheless...and much appreciated in our un-air-conditioned house!)

Moving forward from here, she's hoping to find another part-time job. She's still going strong at Kwik Trip as a Food Product Demonstrator, getting close to her two-year anniversary there, and although the 9.5 hours a week that she works can sometimes drag along for her, she is a faithful, committed employee, and is well appreciated on the job. She (and we!) know that she doesn't do well with too little to do, so we're hoping that a lead her job coach has on a job at Goodwill will turn into something real. I'll (hopefully!!) keep you posted on what comes of that. Ideally she'd be able to put in two 4-hour shifts or something like that, which would give her something productive to do almost every day.

Bobbi's art

 Just occurred to me that I should share here a link to the blog that I keep to record the artwork that Bobbi's been doing. There might be some of you who are interested...

The ART of Bobbi

Baby steps

 

It's incredibly slow and cumbersome, and not at all a practical way to get around yet for Bobbi, BUT every gain that we've made has come this way: tiny, tiny, tiny incremental forward progress, and to have reached the point where her therapist wants her to practice this once at home between each session means that we're poised to begin to see some more rapid growth!

I don't think anyone has ever picture Bobbi being able to walk without any assistance, but THIS (crutches only) would be so crazy different from bunny crawling (like she did when she first came home before her surgery), the wheelchair, or ever her walker. And it's so exciting to see it getting closer!

Family vacation: Day 1

 First step was to bring Mira to her buddies at Crescent Cove. They do a *really* good job there of knowing the kids who stay and of caring for them while they're there.

Kisses goodbye, and she's off.

Next step: load the van! (AND the trailer!) We don't usually use all of the seats in Big Blue because it's pretty tight, but when we need to, we can do 3 (the wide one which used to be the old back row), 3 (the narrower one) and 4 instead of the normal setup where we have the narrow 3, then the 2, and then the four. With this set up, and Mira not with us, and Owen coming up a day later, we had room for the girls' friend, Hope. Here we go!

Our first step was at our dear friends, the Martins (if you've read this blog long enough, you'll remember Chad as the guy who came and helped Matt with all sorts of things on the addition!  (He's mentioned in this post and here are some of his kids at the bottom of this post! Oh - and one with a photo!) They moved away a little over two years ago and WE MISS THEM!!) This was our first chance to visit at their house and see their farm-in-progress, and they made room for us to spend the night.

All of the girls (except Bobbi) in one room!

Got a kick out of this - this is our old bathtub that we removed from our old bathroom before putting on the accessible bathroom! They're using it in an outdoor shower area he's creating.

A few couch cushions, and the trailer behind the four-wheeler worked to bring Bobbi (and the rest of us) on a tour of their property!

It was hard to leave the next day. These people are so special to us, and their home was such a welcoming oasis permeated by the love of Jesus. I hope we can make it up there again!

Our whole crew...and Hope. I just realized that we're almost all color coordinated! Pinks and teals and royal blue? You'd think we planned it!

This one just makes me smile. :)

And then we were off for Duluth, aiming to arrive there at noon...but that's another post.

Black shoes

 Bobbi is super into clothes, and now that she has a job, she is responsible for all of her clothing purchases. Our favorite store is Goodwill (hard to argue with getting four new pairs of pants for under $20!!) and just last week we went on a new adventure - the Goodwill Outlet located in a warehouse in the Midway district. We had learned about this place (where you sort through bins of stuff and pay for it by the pound) from an older friend from church years ago, and Bobbi has always since then wanted to try out "the Goodwill Dump" or just "The Dump" as our friend called it!

So we went, and 10 pounds later (at $1.79 a pound), Bobbi came home with some treasures, including these!

They are practically brand new - in fact, it's hard to tell from looking at the soles if they've ever been worn at all - and we managed to find both shoes in the same bin! (A minor miracle, in some ways!)

And, you see, since Bobbi's wheelchair is still her primary mode of mobility, having shoes that fit properly isn't a big deal like it is for me. These are in between a size 8 (which is what she wears with her ankle-foot orthotics on) and a size 4 (which is what she wears without her AFOs), so, while they don't "fit" her, they also fall within the range of shoes that we're used to seeing her wear, so it works!

At her job, dress code requires "black" shoes, but doesn't specify anything beyond the color. So she wore these last Friday to work. The manager on duty was giving her a friendly bit of teasing as she came in. "Wow! Aren't you fancy today! We must be paying you too much!" She had the perfect comeback ready to fire back. "Well, actually, I found these at the Goodwill...Dump!!! $2.70."

That's my girl. :)

Second poke

 

The five of us who are 16 and older got our second dose of the Pfizer vaccine today. We're taking our chances that we (me and Matt) won't both feel too icky tomorrow. :) Otherwise Rose is going to have a busy day! Above you can see us waiting the mandatory 15 minutes to make sure we don't pass out!

Gillette purchased and remodeled a dingy old one-level warehouse two blocks from their main campus for a vaccination clinic for their patients and all family caregivers of their patients. One of the nurses there today said, "Oh! You're Mira's family!" She's never actually worked with Mira, but, in her words, "You can't work at Gillette without knowing Mira." I guess I knew that Mira-girl was a big deal, but didn't realize what a big deal she is over there! 

Owen, actually, got to do this outing on his first day out of sixteen days of isolation due to his friend (the one family that he's spent time with over the last year!) getting a postive COVID test. Owen got to come home and go right to his room - we'd already removed Krassimir's things and set up the large pack n play that we use for him when we travel in the playroom in the new basement - and that's where he spent the next sixteen days. Well, there, or on the soccer field - I told him as long as no one else was on the fields he could go outside and kick his ball around. When, a few days later, Owen took a mail-in saliva test and got the positive result the next day, he was glad that he could at least now have his friend that he got it from join him on the soccer field! Owen went through the whole thing with no symptoms. Possibly because he's young and resilient, and possibly because he'd had his first dose of the vaccine already. Anyway, he then had ten days from the test, which ended up falling out to a total of sixteen days of isolation. Not exactly how he'd planned to spend his spring break OR the first two weeks of his new part-time job! But he made it through, and is now good to go. We were sure glad we got him stuck away so soon, because he was isolated before what they consider his "contagious period" (two days before he tested b/c he was asymptomatic) so the rest of us could go about our business as usual.

So that's the excitement around here, lately! (Tomorrow the completed Bobbette shows up - that's some *real* excitement!!)

more about the Bobbette

 Four and a half years ago we took our little family on a trip up north to the North Shore of Lake Superior.

In the background is Split Rock lighthouse. In the foreground is our means for hiking with a non-mobile child.

Perched on a rock

At Gooseberry Falls (which is wheelchair accessible until you get right down by the falls themselves)

...at which point Dad can carry down the rest of the way.

Another method for carrying someone who is not yet mobile!

All of us outside of the hotel we stayed at, which is made from converted railcars!

 

We've been talking seriously for the last year about doing it again, but this time around, it's a little more complex. First of all, Krassi is bigger than he was four and a half years ago, and though we still do the "sack of potatoes" carry with him a lot, it's a little tougher now than it was...and Bobbi doesn't work as well that way! Tsvetomira can stay with Crescent Cove, but we wanted some way to have both Bobbi and Krassi be able to be involved with the active parts of our days if we made the effort to take a family trip!

So, we researched, and found this, which is pretty much amazing in pretty much every way: the Joelette.

But the price tag was a little (significantly!) steep for us, particularly because although we have three kids who could potentially use it (Bobbi, Krassi, and likely Reuben some day, too), it's not like we go hiking every weekend!! So, we thought, can we rent it from someone? Nope - closest we could find is in Colorado, and just wasn't feasible.

So, we researched some more and found this, which is not as amazing: (link here). But it has a much more accessible price tag. But would it be worth it for the cost? No foot rest, and, more significantly, would really require ALL carrying, and not have the benefit of the wheel to roll along and support weight during easier/smoother stretches of the hike.

Months passed, and then we remembered that we knew someone (distantly) who makes custom bicycles!!! So we thought, why not? We sent him an email asking if he thought he could rig something up with the more important features of the really nice vehicle with a price tag more reminiscent of the not so nice vehicle, and he said...yes!!!

His family passed through the Cities on their way to Wisconsin last week and left the in-process "Bobbette" as they've named it, with us to try out so he can make any last adjustments before powder coating it (in Bobbi's color of choice - espresso - like her beloved coffee!!)

It works SO WELL. It's so well balanced that when you're just running it along on the ground, both the front and the back person feel like the other must be doing all of the work because it's so easy to work with. He's got a great cushion incorporated in as well as a nice secure harness. The footrest needs a bit of adjustment, but otherwise, we can't really think of anything that needs to change! It's so perfect! (And he managed to figure out a way to get it to fold down small, which was a feature we said we didn't need to have, but because it DOES fold, we can take it in the back of Big Blue without needing to hook up the trailer or take Owen's pick up truck!)

It's so easy to use that even Rinnah is sufficient to be the front "sherpa" when we're going on fairly straightforward terrain.

Here we are this past weekend down by the Mississippi River at a hiking spot (Pike Island) we've enjoyed in the past...but not ever with Bobbi! We paused a bit to throw rocks, so Matt's just holding it on his own. There's an option to flip the wheel back so it can sit stable on four legs when we're stopping for any length of time, but it wasn't worth doing for this short pause.

Set up and take down is pretty quick.

We managed to do a lift over some driftwood at the shore, and even to go up a rough cut flight of stairs. There are two mini-handles on either side of the chair, too, so if we needed to we could easily have four (or up to six, if each person took one handle) people to lift and move if/when the terrain requires.

North Shore, here we come! We have reservations at the same hotel for the first week of June, and we're really looking forward to an adventure. We're bringing Rose and her husband along, as well as our adult niece (and her two-year-old) to stay with Grandma who can't really be left alone anymore, and the girls' best friend, Hope, who we consider to be our seventh daughter. And probably our nephew (Owen and Krassi's age), because even though he's not really into hiking, he and Owen will enjoy the time together, and we've got the rest of the family anyway! (The two of them are our kids' only cousins on Matt's side.)

Go ahead and check out Randy's web page (click on his logo below for the link) - he's the one creating and fashioning the Bobbette for us!