Hmm, slightly long pause between blogs I'm afraid. Nothing more serious than a delay to the kitchen project but it meant that we had to get ready for Denise and Bill arriving at the last minute and we've been living with 4 small children in the house ever since so it been all hands to the pumps in trying to retain some measure of sanity.
The granite company were a week late (for a full blow by blow account of our dealings with this treacherous company I'll shortly update the house project blog) which meant our kitchen was ready for use 2 hours before Denise and Bill's plane landed rather than a full week before. It was all hands to the pump for the contractors too in the last week as you can see from the driveway.
This delay had a small but noticeably detrimental effect on the planned calm attitude with which we undertook our guest preparations. Still we were able to meet them at the airport with some hot tea which is pretty much medicinal after such a long flight with children - by all accounts Ethan and Toby were well behaved though.
The kids were... hmm, is pleased the right word or does the expression 'manic to the point of insanity' better convey the atmosphere in the house over the first few days as the cousins got used to seeing each other again. It has got calmer since then or maybe it is just the medication that us parents have been taking. Dr Bill has prescribed 150cl of wine to be taken every 24 hours while symptoms persist or the children leave for university.
The kitchen still has more work to do (we also bought a fridge that was too deep so we've had to get another one) but is looking pretty good now - take a peek.
The basement is also getting there
Saturday was pretty much just finding our feet with the house full, visiting some of the local shops to buy whole summer wardrobes (don't we just love the strong pound!) and off to a local restaurant to eat. We also managed to find a buyer for all of our old kitchen cabinets and appliances (strange but true) and had to help them get it into their van. They first arrived with a tow-trailer so small we could only get about a 20th of the kitchen in it, but then they came back with a proper one, which only took them 5 loads to get it all into.
It was a really hot day (high 70s) but during our meal we had a storm and it hailed, really big hailstorms for the UK as you can see, but really small for Minnesota, when they have bad hail cars and houses get really badly damaged.
One of the perils lurking in wait for visitors is the dreaded 'Cruelly Placed Low Hanging Chandelier' which has claimed many victims but Bill managed to earn the dubious honour of being the first person to have had blood drawn twice.
On Sunday we went to church then headed out late to the beach as it was in the 80s during the late afternoon.
Went to the Wisconsin Dells with the whole crew on Thursday for 3 nights. The Dells are the waterpark capital of America (and correspondingly low incidence of rabies), its kind of like a watery Vegas wannabe with a lot of the great, the good and downright tacky all off of the same road. It really is one of those places that makes you say 'Only in America' - they have an
upside down Whitehouse for goodness sake. Sadly no pictures of the road but I'm sure we'll be back as its a great place to take kids to. We stayed at the Wilderness resort which has 7 waterparks inside it just for the guests, we didn't even get to one of them over the course of 3+ days there. Here's a
link so you can see some of the rides as we didn't take that many photos.
Oh, maybe we did, here are some...
This was a fun one, Dan and I had races down it.
Apart from all the watery fun we had some fun with the wind too as there were 2 tornado warnings which mean we had to evacuate the pools and take shelter in the corridors of the ground floor of the hotels. Imagine 600 people crowded into a long, narrow corridor. Fortunately I managed to brew a couple of sneaky mugs of tea which we shared and it was only around 45 minutes each time.
On the day of the tornado Bill went up the wall - literally.
The kids found it all really exciting!!!!
Here we are on their boat, they took us on a tour of the Lake which is several miles long.
And here is the view from their back garden, in the background is their water trampoline, complete with slide and other appendages for watery fun - jumping off of the water trampoline into the lake is loads of fun. You can also see their boat and aforementioned jet-ski. Nothing witty to write about all this, it was just really good fun and on a perfect summer's day I really couldn't think of anywhere I would rather have been.
The house is now nearing completion, the kitchen floor was refinished last week, which meant another week out of the kitchen, but the good news is that some of the other rooms are fully functional such as the art room (bit of a posh term for a tiny room with a bare floor).
