or ‘black bogies r us’. 😆
Back up to London again on Monday, train this time. Ady was with us again as he has a few odd days holiday to use up before the end of the year so he’d booked some days off here and there where we already had plans he could come along to. We were off to the RI in the morning and we’d booked tickets to The Cocoon at NHM too so he could come and see it and the kids and I could have another look and revisit some of the bits we’d not spent much time on last time.
Davies had ended up in our bed at some point in the night, Ady was in Davies’ bed and noone really wanetd to wake up. I got up first and roused everyone else, we left about five minutes later than I’d wanted but thanks to some sensible planning Ady dropped the kids and I off at the station to buy tickets and nip into Asda for further food supplies while he went on to the library and parked the car in the carpark there. He did misunderstand my instructions of ‘if there are no other spaces park in the staff bays’ though and parked straight in the staff bays despite the rest of the car park being empty. Not a huge problem but clearly noone had recognised his car as belonging to me so he had a note stuck to the windscreen about it being ‘STAFF ONLY PARKING’ when we finally collected it 11 hours later 😳
The kids and I did our customary running before 9am when it’s a day trip to London routine although this time it was because we knew the train was about 2 minutes away and wanted to avoid crossing the bridge rather than the tracks. And you know, it’s tradition and that ;).
Davies and Scarlett got seats as a youngish lad kindly leapt up as soon as we got on and offered his to them :). Ady swapped with Davies who was having a moment about travelling backwards but had managed to contain that until the lad moved on, so Davies and I stood together for a while, then he got a seat opposite Ady and Scarlett and the three of them sat with a nice woman and chatted about albino animals. I finally got a seat seperate to the rest of them and quite enjoyed watching Ady pretending to be me ;).
We’re getting pretty good at the route across to Green Park now (well it is only 2 stops, but knowing which line and stuff) and by 1030am we were happily installed in the RI cafe with tea and coffee. Alison and children (as opposed to teens) arrived shortly after us and joined us before we ambled upstairs just before 11am.
The lecture was ‘A visitors guide to life on earth’
Join author, lecturer, television presenter and explorer George McGavin on an incredible journey through the planets biodiversity. What would aliens think if they landed on planet earth?
‘A deep space exploration ship has discovered an unexpectedly large number of life forms in an obscure galaxy approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter and containing at least 200 billion stars. Remote sensing and initial surveys indicate that life may have already persisted on this tiny planet for a few billion years.’
This talk will examine the topic of biodiversity, the variation of life on Earth. Each nook and cranny of our world contains living things, from tiny bacteria to huge sea mammals, and this talk will take a unique view of the richness of life here on earth.
He was made up with green face and body paint and refered to earth as a planet number and asked us to pretend we were all from his planet attending a lecture about this new planet they’d found and investigated. I have to confess I had shades of school lessons that went on slightly too long before lunch and stifled a few yawns. Looking around the theatre I saw plenty of the school children doing much the same and there was a fair bit of yawning, stretching, fidgeting and so on. However all five of the kids with us and indeed pretty much all of the other Home Ed kids around us appeared to be held all the way through and indeed the feedback from Davies and Scarlett was really positive. I personally felt he was more engaging and entertaining when he took a few questions at the end and had a more animated feel to him them than when he was working from the slide show. But it wasn’t me he was there to educate and the two KS2 children I have were definitely happy to be there.
We said goodbye to Alison and co and decided to head straight to the Natural History Museum for a look round part of that before our Cocoon tickets at 2pm. There is currently an ice rink outside NHM along with various food and drink stalls and a carousel so we looked at that for a while and watched several people do full body splats in the couple of inches of icy water on top of the rink. Most funny 😆 Inside the NHM I queued for ages to get our tickets from the booking email form and was told slightly snottily that ‘you could have just gone straight there!’ which made me apologise and then feel grudging about both being spoken to like that and accidentally taking responsibility for it at all! Grr.
We decided lunch was in order before anything else so went to the picnic area downstairs and ate while discussing religion, philosophy and who we think is the most intelligent person coming to Christmas Camp! Then we talked about how you’d define that all anyway and what criteria we had for it personally. Decided intelligent wasn’t the right term after all and moved on to enlightened, educated, trained, interesting and academic. And no, none of that is for a wider audience ;). I’m jst blogging it to be mischevious ;).
We put ‘what to see’ to the vote and the kids voted for mammals so we headed to the whale. We walked around the dolphins and whales area and learnt about shading patterns on them before heading off to the Darwin Centre area.
I’m really glad we went a second time, I feel the kids and I got loads more out of it this visit. We spent time really using the interactive displays on stuff we’d not managed last time and were able to walk past bits we’d focussed on last time in more detail. Also having Ady there meant we were able to split up and go at different paces / have adult attention per child on stuff with lots of reading or explaining needed. Both the kids got to have a long go on the ‘planning a field trip’ bit which we’d not managed to do last time. Scarlett and I spent about 20 minutes on it and ‘went’ on two trips – Scotland for flies and Rio for plant samples. You had to plan the whole trip including keeping your baggage weight down, deciding which tools and equipment to take, what clothing to pack, ensuring you dealt with any paperwork and had all the right visa and passport etc. It was great. Scarlett was really rational and reasoned with her choices and made sure she had all the information before making decisions. She didn’t get them all right (I don’t think you are supposed to really, it’s far from easy and she made pretty much the same choices I would have done) and learnt from the feedback she got. Really impressed with that display 🙂
Not sure how Davies got on as he did it with Ady and didn’t seem to spend as long on it.
We watched various scientists in their various labs through the windows and listened to one talking about how he was mounting a plant sample ready to be archived. The kids and I did an activity about mosquitoes and malaria which was good and then crossed to watch real scientists carrying out very similar work for real
We came out of there and spent some time playing with the Climate Change wall which we’d completely missed last time and I’d regretted when I saw it on the website. Really liked that 🙂
(they get that presenting gene from their father ;))
Then we went into the Attenborough Studio for two short films. David Attenborough, Life on camera and Wildscapes. The former made me all misty eyed as it charts DA’s career, his passion and some of the highlights of his documentaries. The latter was amazing as it used five screens, no commentary, just amazing cinematography of nature. Really glad we did that. There were various other interesting looking things happening but either the times clashed with each other or in the case of one event children had to be over 12. On Sunday we’d bemoaned not forward planning our two days and booking a travellodge for Sunday night and staying over rather than going up two days running. I definitely think we’ll book one or even two nights early next year and spent some time at the museums doing all the various things we always run out of time for.
We ended up in the Body section of the museum, which I’ve not been in for several years and must be one of the older sections. Ady and Davies looked at all the optical illusions while Scarlett and I looked at changes in our bodies between children and adults and males and females, an illustration of the menstrual cycle and some memory games. It was then past 5pm and we were all starting to flag so we decided to call it a day.
Outside the ice rink was being skimmed over, the lights were all on and looking pretty in the trees and the carousel was lit up. It was £2 per ride and looked so old fashioned and magical I agreed the kids could have a ride on it. It felt all Victorian Christmassy 🙂
Back to Victoria where thanks to having to wait about 15 minutes for a train we managed to be among the first on it and therefore got our pick of the seats. The journey home felt really slow and we were all really wiped out by the time we actually walked in the front door at about 8pm. Very long day.
The kids had a quick bath to wash London off and then a speedy tea before a very late bedtime. Ady and I also had baths, a less speedy tea and an even later bedtime.