Another trip to London

Hello!

What a busy week it's been so far.

On Monday, Henry had his long awaited appointment at The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Kings Cross, London with a specialist doctor to discuss the apparent problems with the nerves in Henry's hand following his accident. The doctor thinks his hand will improve with plenty of physio and probably won't need to have another operation. So that is good news.

We decided to travel up by car because the train is outrageously expensive but the journey up there during rush hour was pretty bad and we only just made the appointment on the dot. We were straight in and straight out again and as Henry has found all this 'arm palava' a bit of a nuisance, and he is very fascinated by London, we promised that we'd take him to The Museum of Natural History.
Having recently visited The Doctor Who Experience, we decided to go back to the same car park by the Kensington Olympia which cost us £15 and take a taxi (costing an average of £9) to the museum which was not too far away. Entrance to the museum was free.
The dinosaur exhibit was, in Henry's words, awesome!

Here is Henry face to face with a King Cobra!


The three of us really enjoyed this part of the trip and it was great to be able to talk to Henry by himself about what we were looking at. Usually, we do stuff all together but Honor and Henry tend to behave like loonies when they are together (Hubby has now dubbed them Berk and Hair after the notorious duo Burke and Hare) and it's often difficult to have sensible conversations with them. And I commented to Hubby about how, if we homeschooled, I'd come to places like this all the time. But then I remembered that I'm the mother of three very crazy kids and there were a couple of times when we had to prevent Henry from launching himself over the balcony of the blue whale exhibit and so I'll let some other teacher worry about that for a while!

On another note (sorry Hubby!) just thought I'd mention that I really like the latest single Paradise by Coldplay. I'm sorry - but I do!

Minor injuries and museums.

It is the Easter holidays and the kids and I have been exploring various different play areas. Honor and Henry really make the most of these chances to play but with little Hope in tow, the fun has been short lived because when she gets tired and cranky, we have to pack up and leave. The older kids have been extremely gracious about this and came as soon as they were called. Today we were lucky because Hubby worked from home. (Actually, he had a suspected broken wrist and was waiting for an opportunity to go to the local minor injuries clinic to get it x-rayed...)

So while he was home, I was able to take Honor and Henry out by themselves.
We went to Herne Bay where they played at a seaside park and on the beach without interruption...
... and to a coffee shop for a knickerbocker glory!

Then we went to the museum to learn about fossils.

When we got back, Hubby and Henry went to minor injuries. Hubby had an x-ray, but it seems that the wrist is badly bruised. He can't clean the toilet for a couple of weeks!

Actually, yesterday, the kids and I took part in a little modelling project. My cousin is an editor of a local health magazine. She was putting together a poster to educate the public in using alternative health providers to A&E, for example, minor injuries, pharmacists etc. I had to pose as a gardener, with gloves, hat and trowel grimacing, rather unflatteringly with back pain. Henry looked very gorgeous with his skateboard feigning a sprain and Honor looked pretty in a flowery dress pretending to have been stung by a bee. We took one of those 'buzzy bee' flowerpot decorations as a prop, but it was declared 'too cheesy'! My uncle modelled the diy disaster, pretending to hit his thumb with a hammer. When I told him that Hubby was planning to go to A&E about his wrist, he suggested a local minor injuries surgery that had an x-ray facility. I never knew! Good advice, Uncle Ken!

Day off.

Today was an INSET day at school and hubby had arranged to have the day off. After catching up on a load of maths Kumon homework we headed down to Manston to visit the museums by the airport. Unfortunately the Manston museum was closed (only open at weekends). But we were still able to look around the Spitfire museum, which was free! The kids LOVED it. I knew Henry would. He is very familiar with all that World War stuff from the Indiana Jones films. But even Honor got really excited about it. She has studied a bit about it all at school. It's a lovely little museum with a 1940's style cafe where we had a cup of tea and watched the planes taking off. It also has a gift shop. Henry bought a noisy plane and Honor bought a book about Anne Frank. We'll definitely go back again when the other museum is open and spend a bit longer.

So after lunch we had to decide where to go next. I thought of heading into Margate with the idea of either visiting the museum there or the Shell Grotto. But Margate was a dismal place. We drove around for ages NOT finding the Grotto. Then we parked to check out the tourist information centre and museum, but both were closed. We did come across a lovely playground on the seafront, heading out of Margate towards Cliftonville which had a huge, wooden Viking Ship to play on and all sorts of great play equipment. The older two played there for half an hour and then we decided to head back to Birchington for a break at Jungle Jims - one of those indoor play barns. Not really the kind of thing I was looking to do, but the kids had a great time, and... in the car park we saw a caravan for sale which hubby is interested in.

I'm back now and baby is having her nap while the others have gone to their Kumon class. Honor has been doing maths for just over a year as she lacks confidence in this. But she wanted to do English too so she starts this today. She thinks it's going to be easy. She is quite advanced for her age in English but Kumon is all about accuracy which Honor tends to be lazy about. So she might be surprised to find she gets more wrong than she thought. Well, we'll see.