Family Reunion, Part 2- The Cabin

We spent the second half of the week at our family cabin. It is such a great place to be and to relax. Especially after having braved the elements for 3 days, it was nice to have a place to go inside. The kids love it because they can run and run and run. Plus they pretty much did whatever they wanted with very little adult intervention.Crazy cousins

Grandpa's rocket shooter, never-ending fun. With a little air compressor, the rockets would shoot at least a 100 feet into the air.

The Grygla Men

and the women

The kids.

Here is Jacob with his 2 cousins closest in age, Emma and Zoey.

My brother Dave, with the help of others put up quite the zipline down the meadow. The kids loved it and went as much as possible. He also put one over the ice cold pond, but no one seemed deterred by the temperature. There is something about those kinds of experiences that make being a kid so great.
I definitely had to include this sweet little picture of Brooke. What else do you need besides a life jacket anyway?

One the most important parts of the trip were the horses. Just being able to be with them and pet them was heavenly for Anna. Of course she realized once again that she was being deprived and desperately needed a horse and a dog. The poor girl is going to have to wait a while before any of that changes.

Grandma Charlotte and BrookeJacob with his cousin JamesThe plan was for the kids to have "kids camp" while all the adult siblings went off on the big hike. I unfortunately stayed behind for obvious reasons and helped out with the babies. Grandma and Aunt Shanna took all the kids on a hike up to a tree where my great grandparents had carved their initials into a tree. Cousin Sarah then gave a presentation on safety and emergency preparedness to all the kids. Grandma Carolyn had prepared emergency bags for each of the kids. They had a great time and were thrilled. They spent the afternoon making crafts and running around together.
Here is the hiking crew. See how fresh and excited they look? The hike turned out to be quite the challenge, and as you can see from the pictures below took a lot of team work. They all still came home quite exhilarated from their accomplishment, well except for poor Moss with his broken heel.
The water was quite disgusting and they were not excited to find a dead animal lying in a puddle at the top of the climb.

I had to include a few of the more glamorous pictures of these magnificent caves. To walk through them (when not filled with water) is really quite amazing.