What are London/SE mumsnetters doing with their children this half term - it's one day in, I have a cold and am ready to kill!

[Aloha]

Ds is five and dd is two. Have booked to take ds to see Flat Stanley at the Polka Theatre in Wimbledon, we are going to a bookshop and toyshop today to spend dd's birthday money....we may do a daytrip to France on Friday (ds's idea!)...any other ideas? Please! Feel sure there is lots of exciting stuff out there that I can drive to and isn't too frighteningly expensive.

Thanks Marina - we did Bocketts Farm after all and had a good day.
Am going to save the Lookout for the Easter holidays.

When DD1 was about 3 she got very excited about going to the Horniman as it meant she could see the 'brown mingo' again. How were any of us to know it was actually the 'wally bum bum' she was referring to... Have always though of brown mingo as the whole walrus but actually rather apt name for just the bum bit.

I have been working (at home. Like a thing possessed) and DH has been doing the looking after and ferrying around. Am off tomorrow and same dd has requested seeing Big Ben in the flesh. Hope am right in thinking she means the tall clock and not something else.

thanks marina (and my goodness, I can remember those terrible tantrums at 2 when leaving somewhere they were really enjoying - I think it was at that point that I discovered bribery!).

Hazel, marina's right - our half term week is this week coming up. If we do go, I'll post on here and let you know how it was.

(Fox...check my Johannesburg update - on the old thread!)

it was the first thing I checked Blu!

Well, in the end we went to Boulogne for the day, and it has the MOST fantastic aquarium/sea life centre called Nausicaa, which was brilliant from the 3D film you get shown at the beginning (a sharks swims into the auditorium!) and we saw Flat Stanley at the Polka which was excellent for five and up. Ds also saw the Beatrix Potter adaptation at the Unicorn which he really liked too.
We didn't have time for the Wally-bum-bum...maybe next weekend!

Boulogne, what genius. Will be stealing that one as soon as I can.

Mine have had rather a serenely trad halfterm: couple of riding lessons in Hyde Park, Aquarium, Charlotte's Web, extra piano because there was time for it & it is seen as fun, bit of remedial bike tutoring (as yet getting nowhere), Huge Excitement of going with ds to open his first ever bank account (Nationwide, chosen after market research carried out on our very own MN), day trip to Oxford tomorrow. I've seen lots of them because I've been on jury service so compared to normal routine I'm home lovely & early ... so kind of nice all round.

Sounds lovely. I'm not going to Charlotte's web as am afraid of the spider! Do you think a five year old would like it? Thinking of getting dh to do the honours.

Nausicaa is just AMAZING! You can play with sea lions! They come to the glass and you throw a ball to the glass and they love it. Then you go up in the fresh air and watch them romping in the pool with a view of the sea. There are also sharks and zillions of tropical fish and ds (5) and dd (2) and dh and I (ahem) all loved it so much. All the signs are in English and French too, which was great. Had a nice lunch in the walled part of the city too, and the ferry journey was painless (apart from having to get up at 5.40 - aaargh - but you could get a later ferry, go to Calais and drive to Nausicaa in about 30mins). Only downside was not enough time to buy cheap wine and stuff to take home. Will plan differently next time!

The restaurant and cafe at Nausicaa are both run by the hotel/restaurant across the road, the Matelote.
The food in both is great

Well with a name like Marina I should have guessed you'd know about it
It's fab, isn't it?

Do you want me to tell you about a really nice Logis de France hotel 8 miles out of Boulogne, where they absolutely adore children...? I'm afraid we've taken to making a weekend of it lately, aloha (sound of bank account emptying). Nausicaa is brilliant, I quite agree. And the beach is spotless, did you notice?

Hi Marina, yes please! Ds was distraught we weren't saying and announced to complete strangers on the way home 'I want to live in France forever!'

Yes, the beach was immaculate, but we ran out of time to play on it - grr!
We have another ferry fare left so the trip would be free so an overnight stay at Easter would be wonderful.

It is called the Hostellerie des Tourelles at Le Wast, a little village about eight miles outside Boulogne on the fast road to St Omer.
The people who had it for some years have handed over ownership to a very jolly, friendly woman, but stayed working there - just as well, as Monsieur is the chef and Madame is very friendly too.
It's a small unremarkable baroque country house that's been extended at the back and to one side. We've only ever slept in the modern rooms but the ones in the original house are apparently completely adorable (too small to be family rooms but maybe adjoining ones?).
It has a nice garden and you can lunch and dine out there in summer.
What we really like about it aloha is not that it is particularly flash, or luxe (it is a 2 chimney Logis de France and the decor is well-kept French provincial, nothing more). It is just so welcoming to children, for whom you can get cut down versions of anything on the menu. Dd was hauled off to the kitchen in Madame's arms to meet the chef, ds was praised sincerely for his little bits of French.
The food is super - nicely presented, old-school, using plenty of local veg and cheese - and the wine list is excellent value IMO.
So, not boutiquey, but just so relaxing and cheerful
Oh and you are about 20 mins tops from the centre of Boulogne, and about 40 mins from St Omer, which has punt tours around its marshes, lots of wonderful locally brewed beers, and some well-presented if inevitably sad WWII sites.
Family room was £70 for us all with breakfast...about the price of an Express by Holiday Inn on the A102M

Thank you Marina! Mentioned this to dh and we are really keen on the idea. Ds will be thrilled!

They don't have a very revealing website (and it is infested with Boulonnais pop-ups) but you can get all the relevant info via the Logis de France website, and they did answer our e-mails really promptly.
There are also two very nice fermes-auberge in the area, the Ferme du Vert and the Ferme-Auberge la Raterie (we've stayed in the latter, ks I think at the former) which could be a nice alternative in summer. La Raterie has the fattest, most cheerful, and delicious free-range hens I have ever seen! And both have superb gardens for eating out in.

I love going to aquaria (note what I did there, grammar pedants!) and am delighted that I can now drag 2 small children round, instead of looking like a grown up saddo. Went to the one in Monaco last half term, which was ok, but not really aimed at small children. Am really liking the idea of the one in Boulogne - could do a day trip or day and overnight over Easter via tunnel (have dark recent experiences of ferry - aka the "vomit comet").

I picked up on the idea of Flat Stanley on here - don't know how I missed it as we live pretty close and DS's school go to most productions at the Polka. DS(5) and DD(3) went with our nanny and had an absolute whale of a time - really, really enjoyed it, so thanks for that. We did Flat Stanley, grandparents down to visit, and lots of scootering - DD has got a new little three wheeled ones so lots of scootering round the park.

Bink - may need to come and ask advice re bike riding. We are getting one for DS at the beginning of Easter holidays (rather annoyingly he has a mid-October birthday and I don't want to effectively miss the whole summer so am biting the bullet sooner rather than later). Am not a natural teacher (don't even get me started on how swimming is going).

Hijack: Bink/Anchovy please can you give me the benefit of your wisdom on this Nanny Angst thread before I do something stupid and lose my paragon nanny in a rush of guilt-fuelled maternal protectiveness.

OK - have skim read it. Am just going out for lunch/meeting combo but will revert this afternoon with Strategic Thoughts.

I think post-lunch strategies are generally better, or at least more innovative, than the pre-prandial variety!

This is a great thread. Yesterday I completed another stage in my MN initiation by going to the Horniman on your recommendation. It was so funny looking at all the other mums wondering if they were MNers.

This afternoon we will probably do Bocketts farm or maybe the Epsom one.

Bumping this for anyone else who needs inspiration

Bike riding Anchovy - well, sort of depends on your raw material (not meaning the machine). For us, we've just had to leave it and leave it, until ds cannot deny being able to scooter quite adequately, and can climb a tree, and can ski (modestly) even - so has a bit of self-belief to rely on when we say You Can Do It, Go On Try. That's a way of dealing with a nearly 8yo of his sort.

Confident native scooters/climbers/snowploughers you can take other approaches with - the Like-a-Bike approach (maybe your ds too old for that now); or the (similar) take-the-pedals-off-a-real-bike-lower-the-seat + space and time to freewheel endlessly. Or the stabilisers approach, though I've never quite understood how you end up riding properly that way.

For Hazel and anyone else in our vicinity...

we went to Look Out in Bracknell today. My goodness, what a fantastic day out we have had. We are all so tired, we can barely walk! The children told me, on the way back, that it's one of the best places they've been.

The inside bit is a bit like the downstairs bit of the Science Museum but more spread out and airy. Everything is hands on. Lots of great exhibitions - the children's favourites - dd liked a 'light box' where you pose against a screen and it takes a picture leaving your shadow behind. Ds liked the water feature bit (similar to the one at the science museum) and all the physical ones (so bashing lights as they come on, making hot air balloons rise, balancing a ball on air to make it look like it's floating).

We spent about 2 hours inside I reckon going through all the exhibits (they also have little educational activity packs based on the key stages but we didn't do them as the kids were too excited to stop and write stuff down!) . Then we went outside - they have 2 playgrounds (one for age 3-6 and one for 7-11). They also have an aerial challenge for the over 10s. It's all set in a forest and there are several walks you can go on (shortest is a couple of kms to some really long ones). You can hire bikes too.

There's free parking, a cafe and a family ticket I think was £13/14 which was incredibly good value I felt.