Lessons learned - top things to do in Birmingham this summer

[MNBirminghamLocalEd]

I was wondering if people would like to share their best days out this half term - and give inspiration to others who might be wondering how to survive fill the long summer holidays.

I'll start, with our favourite free day out, and best "treat" day.

Best Free Day - Taking bikes out to the Lickey Hills. My 5 year old has a heavy imperfect bike and he's a bit nervous about bumping fast downhill over tree roots, so I was a bit worried I'd be hefting it all the way back to the car 10 minutes in. But this was a fantastic afternoon out, and the boys absolutely loved every minute. We followed a basic trail, and looped back to the brilliant playpark at the end, where they were so entertained they didn't even bother pestering for ice creams. Result: happy, exhausted children and not a penny spent.

Best Treat Day - West Midlands Safari Park (see review here.) A full day of varied entertainment, from lions and rhino to roller coasters, dinosaur animatronics and snake-handling. Expensive, though.

Ooh, glad I saw this, I'm always after new ideas.

Best Free Day Gardening with the kids. A surprise hit - I hadn't expected them to help. Even the three-year-old liked digging the compost into the soil. We now have sunflowers and tomatoes growing in little pots, a mown lawn and a pea/bean tent. Dead chuffed. When it gets warmer, we'll try putting up the tent and camping out

Best Treat Day Attingham Park and Shugborough, giving our National Trust pass some exercise. We LOVE Attingham Park and the brilliant children's playing field - totally worth the hour-long drive. We never bother risking going inside the houses ("don't touch!") but play lots of hide-and-seek in the grounds and take a picnic. Always fun. Unless you lose the children in an over-competitive game of hide-and-seek .

Best Free Day - We had to pay for parking, but we explored a bit of Kingsbury Waterpark last week. Took bikes, and rambled along the canal, then back around the lake. Heard a cuckoo. It was really nice. This was at the smaller car park, btw, as the larger one had queues of cars waiting for parking.

Best Treat Day - Thinktank. The new spitfire gallery and a storytelling session was good and interactive (although better for very little 2-5 year olds rather than Under-8s). Best of all was the outside park, which kept my son and daughter amused for 2 whole hours with water play and lots of games involving weights and forces. Really great educational day out and liked it so much we upgraded our tickets to an annual pass.

Well, we've spent many (free) happy days in the garden so far this summer, and headed out to Cotteridge Park for free tennis/badminton/archery thanks to Park Lives on Wednesdays, which have been ace.

Our Thinktank annual pass got a work out during the wet weather on Friday. My oldest has a new interest in space, so the Planetarium was a great hit. Inevitably though, the boys spent more than an hour playing happily (in the drizzle) in the excellent outdoor science garden (FINALLY they've let people have access straight from the lower floor machines exhibits!), and had to be pulled away from the toddlers' water table.

We went out of town to the National Trust's Baddesley Clinton today, where there's a new children's walk/obstacle course through the surrounding fields. It was BRILLIANT! I highly recommend it for 2 hours of happy outdoors fun.

Anyone else care to recommend some good days out??

Oh, and I ought to plug the Mumsnet Birmingham blog. We reviewed the Lego Discovery Centre in Manchester's Trafford Centre last week:

mumsnetlocalbirmingham.wordpress.com/2015/08/12/legoland-discovery-centre-manchesters-trafford-centre/

Considering my reluctance to drive up the M6, this turned out to be a genuine highlight of the year.

How could I forget? The Big Hoot has been brilliant. We took all day to find about 32 owls, and it was a great way to introduce the children to the city centre and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (not really been brave enough before). It was like a giant treasure hunt, and loads of other families were taking part. We followed the owl prints through Kings Heath whilst school shoe shopping too, which made the experience much less painful!