Town and country

We've had a busy couple of days.  Yesterday we went on a visit to the London Transport Museum.  It was a home ed trip and was free - the entrance fee is normally pretty expensive.

We got the train.  I usually get a bit anxious about this, as it's a whole hour and the kids have a tendency towards noisiness.  I stash a load of things to do in my bag to help reduce boredom (and therefore the development of crazy loud games), sometimes this works, sometimes not.

This time is was great!  Freddie and Betsy - though especially Freddie - played with the awesome story cubes for most of the journey.  They are totally brilliant.  I might invest in one of the other packs, maybe the Actions one.

Meg did some drawing, and was generally happy to chat.  We had our lunch on the train, and journey passed quickly.  Phew.

We got a taxi to Covent Garden.  I find it difficult to wrangle the buggy and our bags and three kids on the tube by myself, with the escalators and fast moving busy people.   The kids *love* London taxis, and we had a very friendly driver.

We had a wander around Covent Garden and waited to meet up with the group.  There was a string quintet playing some popular classics, and we listened to a couple of pieces.

Our friends Caden and Miles came on the trip too, and we walked around the museum with them.  The top floor is about 19th century transport, i.e. horse drawn cabs.  The middle floor is about the development of the tube system, and the steam trains that operated on the underground.  The ground floor was mostly the electric underground and buses.  The kids enjoyed this the most.

Rob met us there after work, and the plan was to have dinner somewhere and get a later train home (I didn't want to take the kids on the train at evening rush hour).  On the way, we stopped to watch a street magician.  Betsy ended up being part of the show.  It was fantastic!  Rob filmed a few minutes:

The magician gave her a balloon dog, which she adored until it unravelled today.  Many. many tears have been shed over the demise of balloon dog.

After the excitement of the show we went to Pizza Hut.  It's very difficult to find a restaurant where then menu has something that all three kids will eat.  Pizza Hut came up trumps.  Freddie enjoyed the chicken strips, the girls had pizza.  The salad was a winner too (if your definition of salad includes breadsticks).

We got the tube back to Marylebone, then the train home.  An excellent day.

If yesterday was about the city, today was about the countryside.  We headed to Wendover Woods, partly because Jarvis's mum has started a new job in the cafe there.  I rarely buy lunch there as it's so close to home, but made an exception today.  

 Then we had a walk, played in the playground and the kids spent ages in the huge muddy puddle.  Boots got stuck in the slurpy mud.  We found beautiful leaves in different hues.  Betsy found a leaf with all the autumn colours in it - lovely!  A great muddy afternoon.