Today's adventure was off to the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood. It showed on our radar as being a museum that was kid friendly, and between it being a bank holiday (what must of us US-ians call a 3-day weekend) and the prior day being a bit too adult-museum intensive, we thought kid friendly was a good way to go. It also was the choice of James and Sarah after being presented with a list of 10 kid friendly museums.
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| A lot of time on the Tube in London |
The trip on the tube and finding the museum was a little difficult despite the smiles from Martha and James on the Tube ride there. Paul was sick today at "home" and Sarah was thrown off by our inability to buy a BLT at the Tesco for her lunch. Sometimes it is the little things that throw you off...
Fortunately the museum had art stations going, and Sarah returned to a good mood while creating a T-shirt design of her own.
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| 10 minutes is pretty short to design & execute a T-shirt, but not for our prolific Sarah! |
The museum itself was a collection of the toys of childhood dating back to 1600. It was really fun seeing toys that I had grown up with and even one toy set that we own (the Playmobil Zoo). My favorite was the Fisher Price downtown. The number of ways to interact with it for the 3-5 set was really quite astounding. I sat down next to the display and showed it to Sarah and she agreed that it was quite an excellent toy that she might still like playing with. She expressed some hope that it had survived the floods and that one of the Aunts still had the set. And of course there is always Ebay...
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| Fisher Price Main Street -- Stoplight, bridge, upstairs apartments, mail facility w/ mail to deliver, fire station, etc -- I wonder if this is why I've always wanted to live in a downtown v. out in the country? |
Pride in their creation? Or just the competition of the most amazing block castle? Either way, smiles from both participants... (after repairing the work that a little boy caused when he partially knocked down Sarah's blocks :( )
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| Niche market -- wonder if the survivalists have mined this concept? |
The traveling exhibit was looking at toys during times of war. It was interesting to see the toys there varying from glorifying general war & combat through the years, propaganda against the enemy, to toys designed to smuggle escape tools in to prisoners. I enjoyed the tiddlywinks set where one of the tiddlywinks would break and a escape map of the local area was hidden inside! They also had a nice morse code exhibit which was fun to play with a friend. And in the shop I quite liked what appeared to be toy soldiers, but were actually green skateboarders.
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| Moods had improved in the end |
Tomorrow's adventure -- the science museum. Our second choice from the list of 10. And a night out for mum & dad to see The Book of Mormon. London is a great city despite the costs.
The new email set up works great--Found your update when I woke up this morning! Love those Fisher-Price toys--Wish they'd bring them back as is!
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