Today, I thought it would be a good day to properly start getting out of the house. I'd originally had all sorts of grand plans involving a car drive across the M25...those got scuppered in the end.
Which day do we go to @sciencemuseum & which day do we hit up A3 Baby Barn? Decisions, decisions...
— Bryony Dick (@beginningbryony) October 22, 2013
In the end, after an impromptu Pro/Con list (i.e. sitting in bed counting on my fingers at 11:30 last night), I decided that in the contest of the Science Museum versus The Look Out, that the latter came out the winner. Don't get me wrong, I love an excuse opportunity to go to London, but this was closer, cost just as much as the day's parking, and would give us more time in the venue of choice as we wouldn't have such a long drive. When you're taking an afternoon trip after a Skype date with your husband, you have to factor in these sorts of things.
Mama & E in the mini market. #IDidThisAsAKidToo
So, we hopped in the car and skipped over to Bracknell to check The Look Out...um, out. To be honest, I'm really glad we went: the whole thing was brilliant.
What's a DIY job without a bit of demolition?
The 'build a house' play area that they have is fantastic. The 'house' is just big enough for little kids to climb in, and they can go up to the first floor and work on putting plastic shingles on a section of the roof. E liked it more, though, when he was taking all of the carefully placed shingles off and sending them back down the shute to the box below. To be fair, he worked out really quickly which slot was for the conveyor belt that brought shingles up and which one was for sending them back down again. We also had fun building walls with the giant Lego-style blocks and letting him ride around on the push-pedal diggers.
After climbing back out of the Lego bins, a proud boy stands with his wall.
After that, it was off to the Hands-On Science exhibits. E's first love here may have been the ping pong balls in a funnel. Sort of like the old coin races you could find at the mall...but with ping pong balls. Oh, and jazzed up so as to be labeled a black hole simulator. I may or may not have made several Neil deGrasse Tyson references while he played with that for 20 minutes...
As you can see, we also had a moment trying to reenact that scene from Big where Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia play the big keyboard in F.A.O Schwarz. ...Okay, so maybe that was just me trying to reenact that scene, but I defy any child of the '80s not to think of that movie as soon as they see a giant floor keyboard. #babiesofthe80s
Then, we moved on to the Bernoulli blower, which E loved. He thought it was the best thing that the ball would 'fly' all on its own in the wind. We spent a lot of time chasing it down when he'd yank it from the air. Of course, by the end of playing with it, he mastered the art of getting the inflatable globe back into the air stream so that it could float patiently waiting for the next kid to come and fiddle with it.
Another nostalgia moment for me? In the toddlers' section, they had a mini market. I have vague memories and good pictures of me - at the same age - playing in something similar in the town where my sister was born in Virginia. So, of course, I had to entice E over to have a look and play. Whereas I was always more interested in the toy fruit and veg, E's love was the till with its fake money. It took some convincing to make him put it back.
Vicariously reliving my childhood. Isn't that what kids are for?
We ended the trip with another round in the build-a-house play station and then popped into the gift shop to let him choose a toy. With a little money from his great-grandparents (his grandmother's mum & dad), we searched the shop and let him pick out a wind-up toy dump truck to bring home. He's already decided that it's got Bob the Builder sitting in the front.
So that was a fantastic day out for us. I'm sure we could have stayed for ages longer had we gotten there earlier, but E was fairly satisfied with the 2 hours we spent in the end. Besides, now I know it's worth coming back with multiple rugrats in tow in the future. 2 years seems to be just the right age to really enjoy enough of this place to make the trip worth your while. It's hard for me to gauge how a younger kid would fare...I'm starting to forget just what sort of attention span E used to have before now.
So, The Look Out. Good fun close by and for the equivalent of a day's parking in London. When you're not up for the drive into the city, you can't say fairer than that.
I've been neglecting the blog a bit lately. At least as far as yesterday was concerned, I have an excuse: we spent the whole day down at the beach. Have a peek over at Instagram for a few photos from the day.
Anyway; a few weeks ago the Husband, E, and I had a chance to spend the day in London to visit with our brother & sister-in-law, as well as a few friends who were in town from the States for a couple of days. And let's be honest: when do I not jump on a chance to spend more time back in London? So we hopped in the car and hit the road to catch up with our friends and do a bit of sightseeing as well.
checking out the Shard in the background.
Our first stop was Borough Market. I hadn't properly toured around the market since I was a student on my study abroad semester five years ago. Holy crap. How has that much time passed since I first came here?
But the market was lovely. We had a good time looking around at the stalls, though it was absolutely heaving with people that day. We weren't sure we'd be able to find the crowd we were meeting up with, but we found them well enough in the end. After a tasty lunch of bacon butties, we dashed across the street to grab a bit of ice cream. The store was cute enough, and the ice cream wasn't bad, but I was still holding out for a Snog frozen yoghurt later in the day...and you'd better believe I got it, too!
He was happy with any excuse for a treat.
After a bit of logistic debate amongst the party, we decided that the next stop on our tour of the city would be to head back up to Exhibition Road - a familiar stop for all of us. And aside from the nostalgia factor, we would have the chance to take Ethan to see...The Dinosaurs! Oh yeah. I think I was more excited than Ethan was about the prospect of watching him roar in harmony with the animatronic T-Rex and growl happily at all the fossils and reconstructed skeletons.
Rawr!
Of course, first, we had the Tube ride over to South Kensington, and that was a hoot. Ethan loved his first chance to run around the Tube car as we rode. He was quite firmly strapped into his buggy when we came back at Easter...plus it was packed everywhere we went, so there was no good opportunity to let him really soak up the experience until now.
Chillin' with Uncle Jake on the Tube.
Let no one say he didn't make the most of it. Once free to move about the cabin, Ethan wandered across the aisle and picked his own seat, sat in it politely, and enjoyed the view of everything whizzing past the windows of the car. Time of his life. Seriously; I'm glad we had dinosaurs to look forward to after that because nothing else would have been impressive enough.
After South Kensington, it was time to head a little farther north to Camden Town. Another place I hadn't really seen in five years. (I used to live on Steele's Road.) We went to hang out and relax at our friend Paul's flat. He and his flatmate (and another friend) Morgan keep bees out on their balcony! This is a serious operation: there's the framed hives, a beekeeper suit, sugar water for the bees, and all the stuff to extract and jar the honey. It all looked pretty awesome. The Husband even geared up to take a closer look.
Turned out this wasn't such a good idea. It was hot and the bees were angry, and one particular bee took a strong dislike to people being in its personal space. This dislike was expressed by a vicious sting to the forehead for the Husband. Poor thing: that bee sting was agony for the rest of the day!
But that didn't stop us from having some fun with E out in Regent's Park and having a lovely dinner at the Camden Town Nando's before heading back home with Angus and Emily to hit up a gathering at the in-laws' house the next day. All in all, our trip was a really good time.
If there's one thing I don't like, it's blank white walls. They're so soulless and uninteresting. This is why our home is covered in pictures. The only room that now has no art hanging on the walls is the bathroom...and that may change in the course of time, too.
Anyway, the room that was hardest to work on was our bedroom. Next to our bed is one huge blank wall. The only problem? It forms a tiny aisle between itself and the edge of our bed, so anything too low-hanging would feel intrusive and get in the way when I climb in and out of bed. Not ideal.
In the end, I decided that the best way to deal with this would be to level the art I hung with the shelf the Husband put above our bed back at the beginning of the year. So, I played with a few arrangements that involved a level lower border and got to work. The trick for hanging things without having to make 4 nail holes per picture? I marked the hooks with painter's tape and then positioned the frames on the wall, leaving the tape behind to mark where I needed to hammer in my nail. I'll be honest; this trick sounds great, and with practise I'll get it down, but this first time I did have to re position the nail for one of my frames a few times. I'm pretty happy with the end result though:
The pictures?
Far left: An old postcard from the Freer & Sackler Galleries at the Smithsonian. I think it's a Byzantine image of St. Peter and St. Paul.
Middle: A lovely print from TheDriftingBear of the latitude and longitude coordinates of where we got engaged. It also has the date and the place name - Holland Park back in London. That one's just fun. I like art that has a story behind it. (PS - for those in the US, TheDriftingBear has an Etsy site with prices in USD!)
Top right: Another Freer& Sackler postcard; this time of Jesus on Palm Sunday.
Bottom right: I am the postcard queen. This one is from our trip to Bath on my last birthday.
We might expand this little arrangement; it might stay the way it is. We're not sure for the moment, but we're definitely loving the way it looks for now. (Sorry I don't have a wider shot of the whole room for you...it's a bit messy.)
The shadows have grown long and the sunlight now streaming through the leaves and into the bedroom window has softened with the waning day. Bags and boxes and clothes are strewn across the floor with a sense of neglect and abandon. The bed is unmade; covered in papers and assorted odds and ends of clothing that managed to migrate from the floor or on top of the suitcases. I am sitting on a cheap IKEA stool cushioned by a cheap IKEA pillow, with another - even cheaper - IKEA stool holding my papers and box full of pens, hi-lighters, and Post-Its. Such is my life.
I can now say that I actually feel as if I'm back in school. The past 5 hours have actually been spent attempting, and sometimes even completing research. I've read articles on JSTOR, Project MUSE, the websites for the Tate Britain, V&A, and NPG, and even - true to my undergraduate form - Wikipedia. There's something satisfying in realising after 2 highly intimidating seminar sessions that perhaps I'm not as hopeless as I thought.
After hours of reading on everything from Godfrey Kneller to mezzotints to Banyans and writing copious notes on such, you'd think I'd unwind by watching mindless TV, right? Not so. Only I could somehow find solace from hours of reading and writing by doing even more reading and writing! What sort of reading and writing? Oh, of course only the mindless sort.
Reading: the latest Dan Brown novel which is making the rounds through all of my flatmates like a communicable disease during fraternity pledging.
Writing: my blog. A beautiful exercise in being simultaneously informative and self-centred.
Perhaps, though, as a special treat I'll browbeat teh interwebs into cooperating long enough to let me enjoy the latest episode of Private Practise before my back permanently sinks into a hunched-over position signalling my regression from life as a fresh-air-breathing, Regent's-Park-running Human Being to life as a bleary-eyed, indoor-dwelling, internet-database-researching hermit, otherwise known as a Graduate Student. Or perhaps, after months of prolonged exposure and close contact, I'll become fused to my laptop in a creepy sort of symbiosis only previously seen in Disney's latest epic fail, Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World's End. Or maybe it's more like the Borg in Star Trek...I'm not sure.
yeargh...no onomotopoeia is sufficient to convey
such thorough disgust.
At least I have 2 pages of nicely colour-coded notes to show for my efforts. And no carbuncles yet...
