Family Invasion

We cunningly planned for Dad and Sarah and Denise, Bill Ethan and Toby to visit during a nice quiet period at work for me so that I could get home early etc. The schoolboy error of course is that as I work in IT I should have known we'd be running late so it ended up being a really busy time at work, but as you can see we still managed to get out of the house at least.

Redneck Tennis
Down at Minnetonka regional park (the Barbie playground) Dan and Ethan engage in a game of Ladderball (aka Redneck Tennis) the aim of which is to throw the non-lethal bolas onto the coloured rungs where 3 points are scored for a blue rung, 2 for red and 1 for white.
Then its off to the now flooded sandy park (see Dean and Ginny's visit and the handstand photos for how this looked a few weeks earlier) for more traditional pursuits such as bucket tipping.

Of course you can't keep the boys off the Wii indefinitely...
And lego
Boys of all ages love lego ...And big splashes (you need to open this picture up for the facial expressions)Monkey bars
And guns of courseWhereas girls just like hugs from their Dads...
and running through the roses
And poses
Bigger girls like glasses of wine
All girls like hanging around in malls (sort of)...

But all children love a storyAnd a paddle in the lake on a hot day is just the ticket for everyone
And it wouldn't be a visit to Minneapolis without a visit to Minnehaha Falls








With brave babysitters on hand up for the challenge of 4 kids we posed for a mugshot before heading out for a meal out
Dad and Sarah headed off on a massive road trip and we all headed up to the North Shore - a lot of these photos look like we separate but on long trips having kids with iron bladders means you get places pretty quickly.

Here we are at Gooseberry Falls - no snow this time so how much trouble could a boy get into
There's only one way this is going to end
Ah well it was good while it lasted




Then up to Grand Marais for a very sunny weekend






Here we all are at Temperance Falls

End of Term

I'm playing a little catch up on the blog at the moment so step into a time machine if you will and we'll go back to the end of May....

Dan finished his first year at his new school with a 'graduation' ceremony (I'm with Mr Incredible on this one) leaving him with 3 full months on his hands. I didn't really get the whole 3 months off for summer thing when I moved over but they partially use it to staff up activities and facilities that only occur in the Summer, so our local waterpark is only open during the summer holidays and is primarily staffed by high school students, as are most lakeside beaches and other venues).

Our youth group also did an end of term event, which involved lots of different activities around the city. Dan and Becky even got to join in on the pedalos and they loved being with the older kids. Dan was jumping from shore to boat which we would have been more worried about if 3 of the people in his pedalo weren't lifeguards.



Then all back to ours for a BBQ and a farewell to some of our seniors.