First Bank Holiday of the Year

You have to wait a long time for your first holiday of the year in the US; Memorial Day doesn't come until nearly the end of May! We ramped up for the holiday by hosting a minor party for Doug's 40th. Andy made a profiterole cake (which they don't have in this part of the US at least).

Ken found Doug a Def Leppard t-shirt (now filed under 'great present ideas' - check out the look on Ken's face)
Doug was pretty happy about turning English and 40 in the same week
The weather has got a lot warmer and we all made the schoolboy error of staying outside until very late and then retiring to watch English comedy shows (in this case Father Ted and Green Wing) until 3:30am - really not clever when you have 7 kids in the house who do a fair impression of rioters, except rioters don't get up before 7am.

The rest of the weekend was somewhat more sensibly paced, we revisited Minnetonka Regional Park on a glorious Sunday afternoon.


And the Zoo on the Monday

Nice parrot - its a Hyacinth Macaw
Dan and Becky would play all day (or at least until the hypothermia set in) in the water fountains

And I have to put this on the blog even though it is proud parenty as I want to remember this when Dan paints his room black and won't be seen in public with me. Andy asked Dan to think of words to describe me and Dan's (unprompted) list was:

• Strong
• Clever
• Cunning
• Encouraging
• Good to play with
• Good Dad

For those of you who tried the mystery city quiz on the last post the answers were:

1. Chicago Style (the city was Chicago and it had a whole style of architecture named after it - the style involved deliberately showing where the structural elements of the building were from the outside)
2. The biggest building in the world by volume is the Pentagon
3. The World Fair in 1893, the idea was to show that Chicago could do grand buildings in the European style
4. The strange thing about the 3 leaved skyscraper is that the architects who designed it had never designed any building before (not even a house), this was literally their first project!