Lorden's Big Adventure: 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 course

Whereas 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 story

And 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