Tiny Tate

On the advice of @MumsnetBloggers, we headed to the Tate Britain on Saturday. Despite studying Visual Culture in London (which was largely a study of the museums and galleries around London), I've only ever been to the Tate Britain once. I don't know why I hadn't thought to explore it more before. This Saturday they had a special under-5s festival, Tiny Tate, which was lots of activities for the littlies and a chance for them to show off their new activities in their art trolleys.

Kit enjoyed exploring bits of the gallery with his cone, and enjoyed making a shapes collage. The best thing about the art trollies was that you could pick what you wanted to work with, which meant that Kit was fully engaged with the activity as he had chosen what paper and what he wanted to stick on it.

We explored letters in the Live Book, which Kit really enjoyed, I'm thinking I may use big letters on the floor as a way to help him with reading and spelling later on.

The only timed activity we made it to was the Sound It Out activity, which was great (although Kit wasn't so sure, as he kept trying to run away - I think it was really aimed at a little bit older kids). Basically, there were three people leading it and creating rhthyms with words.

We'll definitely head back to the Tate Britain and enjoy the art trolleys. I remember before I had Kit, on seeing kids in galleries doing art activities, saying I wanted to be the kind of parent that encouraged their child to interact with what they saw in that kind of way (I also said I wanted the type of child who ran around an art gallery with fairy wings on - so if you see a little boy running around with fairy wings that'll be me chasing them!)

Weekend fun at the Thames Festival

I've been hiding from the blogoshere for a little while. Everything has been a bit manic. We did have a lovely weekend, before all the trauma of this week.

We met up with my lovely ex-housemates to go and explore the Thames Festival. We started off at the We Make London craft fair and were very tempted by lots of lovely handmade things. As we travelled along the river there were loads of kids activities but Kit decided to fall asleep while we were at that point so he missed out on decorating a hat, painting a fish and other fun looking activities.

He also missed out on meeting the baby vegetables, my friend Vicky was given the responsibility of looking after one of them.

We ended up at the Tate Modern playing in the under-5s area, Kit was enjoying the slide lots and lots, and dragging my poor friends around lots - he tells me to go away when there are other people to play with!

Ended the day browsing the Crafty Fox Pop-up market while Kit ate some yummy macaroni cheese from the macaroni cheese stall! Then we headed back home so that Kit could sleep and we could drink lots of wine and natter.



A Stroll Along London's Southbank

We went on a mammoth walk with my parents at the weekend. I love the way that if you just walk in London you realise how close together everything really is, and it's much nicer than squishing into a stinky tube. You also save money, get exercise and find things you never would have known were there. On the subject of saving money, everywhere we went was free (in fact mostly everywhere we go is free - I'm a cheapskate!). We walked from Victoria Station to London Bridge Station essentially. On our way we did lots and lots of fun things.

We went to the Vintage Marketplace at Southbank. Nanny treated Kit to a go on the vintage car ride.