Pink Playgrounds and Ice Skating

Becky was in the wars this week, we have these armless rocking chairs that sit on the floor which are meant for watching TV in (probably as this is America) which the kids do anything but sit in , mostly they use them to jump off of or knock over etc.. and Becky came off of one of them straight onto the window ledge. Et voila, one black eye..
In order not to put our children at any more risk of injury we decided at the last minute to start Dan having some ice-skating lessons.
Dan absolutely loved ice-skating, and despite falling over countless times he is desperate to go back and do some more. Its pretty much compulsory for kids here to ice-skate so they are quite chilled about getting kids in the rink by themselves on their first lesson, they did quite fun things too like getting them to catch bubbles, playing 'heads' shoulders' knees and toes' etc..

The tree in the front garden (the one with the red leaves from the last blog entry) is now looking like this.
Just to remind you it looked like this a week ago.
Which meant another opportunity to use the leaf vacuum/shredder

Then we headed to a local lake we'd not been to yet (as there are 10,000+ lakes in Minnesota there will always be lakes we haven't been to yet, and the blog could get repetitive but this was a close by one). As it had a beach Dan was straight off with his shoes before realising how cold it was.


Still warm enough to play with buckets and spades for a good hour before heading off for dinner. We went to a buffet restaurant called Q-Cumbers which was insanely good value as it was an eat all you want which included a brilliant salad bar, ice cream, biscuits and muffins, mexican etc all for less than £11 for the 4 of us! I have to say, we hadn't seen that many really large people in Minnesota, now we know they were all hiding in Q-Cumbers.

On Sunday we headed to Minneotonka after church in one of our, 'find somewhere that looks good on the map and let the details look after themselves' expeditions. These typically have a sub 50% chance of being an unqualified success, the usual pattern being

• drive somewhere nice
• look at the scenery
• try to find something to do with the kids
• circle around a lot
• keep circling
• have a replanning session by the side of the road somewhere
• get lost
• buy some sweets
• go home

This time however we got lucky at the penultimate step and got directions to a small park by the side of a lake. Despite it being really cold again Dan decided to paddle in the water and spent 20 minutes getting wetter and wetter.
And climbing up the outside of climbing frames
Andy is right on top of the kids when they go on climbing frames to avoid any more accidents :-)

After a change of clothes we got lucky again and came across the girliest play area ever, not sure if it was designed for girls or if they just got a great price on some left over stock, but it was a huge pink play area (picture hardly captures the size or pinkness of it) where we stayed for a while.