I take it all back! No more swimming or soft play!

Posted on August 10, 2011 by katese11

Amid all the riot coverage yesterday, the ever-reliable Metro published a small article on p11 about the state of today’s toddlers (aka tomorrow’s looters). As far as I can see, it hasn’t been reproduced online anywhere but I’ll do my best to share its wisdom with you. According to a new survey, toddlers are “pampered but ill-fed”. In this shocking survey, it was revealed that 80% of toddlers have…wait for it….tried pizza and chips. A number of those have also tried chicken nuggets. And there’s more – parents spend £1000.00 a year on activites such as swimming and “soft play”. Hence the pamperedness of our little ones.

I was shocked and dismayed.

By the quality of the journalism, naturally. There were so many ridiculous things packed into this short article that I barely knew where to start. Right this second, i’m questioning how anyone manages to spend £1000.00 a year (£20.00 a week) on swimming and soft play. That must mean you go to one or both every day of your life. Possible but it seems that the figure is taken from a very small sample of people who do that. As for the rest of the article, well here’s my response to the Metro (almost guaranteed to not get published)

“Hi

I felt I had to respond to an article on p11 of the Metro yesterday morning. Sorry the response is a bit late but, like most Londoners, I was a little preoccupied last night. So, the “shocking” claim that “80% of toddlers have tried pizza and chips”. Really?! The shocking thing is that 20% haven’t. Toddlers will try anything they see adults eat and a lot more besides. Let me share with you some other things that 80% of toddlers have tried – dirt, bubble mixture, their own bathwater (which probably contains their own pee)…I could go on. Trying pizza and chips does not make them ill-fed. If you’d said that 80% of toddlers were fed nothing but pizza and chips, that would have been an interesting point. Incidentally, pizza made well is not a bad foodstuff for toddlers (as long as you limit the salt) as it can combine all their major foodgroups.
Lets move on to the real shocker – the idea that toddlers are pampered because they’re taken swimming and to soft play. Soft play during the winter is a basic need. Toddlers need a good run-around every day and most people in London don’t have huge houses where they can do that. There’s a limit to how long you can stay in a park in the winter and the free provision (one o clock clubs etc) is being cut all the time. So, soft play is the only viable alternative. As for swimming?! That thing that exercises them and teaches them a basic survival skill? If that’s pampering then I hand in my parenting license right now. I have clearly misunderstood the whole point.
It takes nothing to make a parent feel guilty about the way they bring up their child. Please think before you publish such ill-conceived, sensationalist articles.

Kate, se11″

Today, we’ll be leaving the house and hanging around wherever’s open post-rioting. Then I might post some interesting new material and stop brooding on stupid journos. In the meantime, feel free to form your own opinions….

3ChildrenandIt

Posted in Rants | 7 Comments

London in a crisis

Posted on August 9, 2011 by katese11

So, you’ve probably been wondering where I’ve been the last few days. The answer is right here, carrying on with life in the wake of the chaos our city seems to have found itself in. I last updated on Sunday, just before our local shopping street descended into anarchy. Two days later and the city is a different place – bits of it gone forever, bits of it changed forever. Our area is as yet untouched but we wait nervously for the darkness to see what will happen tonight. Will it be us next?

I doubt it somehow. The looters have been concentrating on places they can steal stuff from – so mainly shopping areas. Our estate is probably home to some of those very same looters and as our lodger so eloquently put it “you don’t poop where you eat”. (He’s american so can get away with saying poop). Still, we’ve made an escape plan should anything happen and I doubt we’ll be sleeping soundly.

I made my feelings on London very clear in my first ever post and they haven’t changed. We’re staying, at least till someone throws something through our window. Tomorrow’s activities with Roo will be local and low-key but we’re not hiding yet. Life goes on. Ask me again tomorrow morning…..

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Some housekeeping…..

Posted on August 7, 2011 by katese11

No, not in the actually tidying my house sense. Well, I wiped a few surfaces in the bathroom earlier. Does that count? Anyway, it was blog-verse housekeeping I was referring to. You may now notice that I have tagged and categorized all my posts – in my usual inconsistent way, swinging freely between singular and plural forms (like those baby books that alternate between “he” and “she”….I find it a little unnerving). You can now search for posts under such enticing categories as “Creating precious childhood memories or something” and “Token attempts at culture”. Enjoy!

Oh, and I also updated my Google Map. I really do spoil you people.


View Larger Map

(Or maybe I was bored cause I’m rewatching a film that I partly watched last night but mostly slept through. So I feel like I’m watching it twice in two days without the benefit of actually knowing what happened)

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London Transport Museum – 07/08/11

Posted on August 7, 2011 by katese11

Yeh! We did it! (As Roo would say). After a looong time of talking about it, we finally got round to going to the London Transport Museum. I was put off by the price for ages (£13.50 per adult) but when someone told me that gave you unlimited access for a year, I figured we’d get our money’s worth.

Reuben is very into transport at the moment, in case you hadn’t picked that up already. So a place full of trains and buses that he could climb on seemed perfect. And we’d finished church early, had had lunch and he was having a nap so we had time to wander over there. We went in, through the world transport walk and into the lift (in a stroke of genius, the display in the lift didn’t show the floor number but instead counted back from 2011 to 1800) and he woke up as soon as we got out. Perfect timing (well, technically he woke up 209 years before he was born but never mind). He seemed only momentarily confused before running off and climbing onto the carriage and stroking the model horses.

The next level down got even more exciting, as carriages made way for choo-chooooos! There’s a slightly frightening toddler-sized gap beneath the trains that Roo didn’t manage to fall into but something to be aware of. Now, if I was the museum-train building type…sorry, not gonna start all that again. Just this word of warning – keep close behind on level one. We ran around that level for a while until we found the first prize of the day – a bus where you could sit in the driver’s seat. Now, I may have mentioned this before but Reuben tried exactly this trick in Coram’s Field, only it was a real minibus, it was full of disabled children and the man who was meant to be in the driver’s seat seemed to be in an “unimpressed by toddler antics mood”. Whoops. Which is why museums like this are a good idea. I think. Or maybe they just encourage him.

Hee hee…the look on his face here looks like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t have (did he learn that expression at Coram’s?). The shady figures on the right could be undercover policemen, no?

Downstairs there were lots more buses to climb on (and some to not climb on but for once this didn’t cause massive issues) and tube trains to run in and out of. There was a mock-up of a tube driver’s cab (with a simulator type thing on a screen in front so you really felt like you were driving!) but that was being rather annoyingly hogged by a random Daddy. To be expected, I guess. One of my favourite things was a corner exhibit of digitally animated London Stuff e.g. a graphic showing the Oyster touch-in and outs over the course of a day. It really was very pretty as well as being interesting. Not sure Roo really appreciated it but me and Nathan did. Roo’s favourite bit was a model trolley bus inside a glass case on the floor that skimmed up and down its track and (at one point) into a tunnel. Not the most exciting sounding thing but it kept him and some older children fascinated for ages. They were all on their knees, crawling along to keep up with it. I didn’t quite see the appeal but don’t knock it if it keeps him quiet. I say quiet, I mean shrieking excitedly but he was being good anyway.

On top of all this (you need MORE?), there’s also an under 6s play area with a fake toddler sized bus, boat and taxi (with comedy punchbag-shaped passengers. What message is that sending out?!). The bus was particularly well thought out, as every seat in it had a steering wheel in front of it. That significantly cut down on a number of toddler punch-ups as they weren’t all fighting over the right to be the driver. Don’t worry, they found other stuff to fight over. Like the table with the wooden version of London on it (quite geographically inaccurate, I have to say. I know a little boy who had a far better one set up). There was a trough cut into it with a train track and train – kinda like a stylised tube I suppose – and there was many a tantrum over that train. Not from Roo, weirdly enough, but from every other toddler there. And also over the spinnable London Eye. Ah, I love 2-years old en masse…. Anyway, there was generally enough to keep them all happy all the time. Shocker, hey?

VERDICT: Go there, especially if your toddler is excited by a) trains b) buses (not the ones you have to get on in real life but the kind you can clamber all over) c) tube trains d) all of the above. Don’t be put off by the admission price, just make the most of it and go as often as possible!

More details here (official website)

Posted in Token attempts at culture (museums) | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Where not to take a toddler outside London

Posted on August 6, 2011 by katese11

Bracknell.

It’s just grim and crazy. Oh, now I’ve offended all the people in my readership who live in Bracknell. I’m sorry. But really, have you looked around you?

A small explanation – today we went to a friend’s BBQ in a small village, just south of Reading. En route we needed to stop at a Mothercare to exchange a stairgate (wacky nighttime fun with my amazing little Houdini…but that’s a whole other story). I wanted to avoid the masive faffiness of going into Reading itself on a Saturday and my perfect Plan A (branch just off the M4, next to a lovely big park that I could write a more interesting blog post about) fell through because Reuben rather inconveniently fell asleep just before we were due to turn off.

So, plan B it was then. Bracknell. I know very little about this place other than it’s the same junction as ouir eventual target, on the same side of the M4 and a smallish town. I know its neighbour Wokingham a little better and had imagined Bracknell to be much the same – a market town, with a single high street and some picturesque tea rooms and stuff.

No, it’s Croydon-on-Berks.

I should have known from the sat-nav directions – “Take the first left at the roundabout, bear left on the double roundabout and then straight ahead at the roundabout”. When has a large collection of roundabouts signified anything good? Basingstoke? Swindon? Milton Keynes? (Aggghh, and now I’ve alienated anyone who lives in those places. Sorry Allie). We drove round and round in circles looking for Mothercare before being directed onto a road which appeared to lead into some kind of car park.

So we parked there, relieved to get out, especially after many screeching turns (no, not that first left – that’s part of the larger gyratory over by the Hollywood Bowl). We got into a lift that I swear was from some kind of low-budget horror movie and went down to the ground floor. And then we were back on the road which appeared to lead into some kind of car park and NOWHERE ELSE so we went back up in the lift, I made another remark about how it was the kind of lift no-one would ever try and kill us in, back to the floor we were on, round a corner, almost into a hotel, across another car park and down into some luridly painted ramps (dark green and lime green, to match Roo’s dino shorts), with some kind of world music being piped through. There was a large picture of children happily playing in a fountain. We didn’t expect to find happy children. And guess what – we didn’t.

Emerging onto another set of ramps, we heard the aforementioned fountain (thought that was the rain for a minute but hooray! the rain was only a drizzle) and saw a shopping precinct lifted directly from mid-90s Basingstoke. And Mothercare! Huzzah! I was crazy-hungry at this point but the only food outlets I spied were the hot-dogs and candy-floss van (really? Were we at the fair?) and a stall called “Troll’s Kitchen”, selling bogey stew and used tissues. Didn’t fancy it much.

Then I noticed the whole area was covered with people flyering for the English Defence League. One girl had a t-shirt on saying “Proud to be English”. I felt like saying “I’m proud to be a random mix of English, German, Scottish and Polish, Did I mention I’m Jewish?”. They got a flier into my hand before I realised who they were so I had to get rid of it before going into Mothercare. I don’t normally litter but in this case, I made an exception. You don’t want to exchange a stairgate if the sales assistant thinks you’re a racist. Just imagine!

Through this, I noticed that the world music that was being piped into the corridors of doom was coming from a real live band, as part of an event called “Love Bracknell”. I wasn’t loving Bracknell. Neither was the band, I’m guessing, seeing as they were an ethnically diverse band playing in front of a load of white fascists. We did what we had to do in Mothercare, then Nathan dragged the new stairgate back to the car and me and Roo desperately searched for an outlet – Superdrug or somesuch – that could sell us a packet of crisps. Eventually I found a cafe where we could buy three flapjacks, for a pound each. And then we got the hell out of there.

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Fire Brigade Museum – 05/08/11

Posted on August 5, 2011 by katese11

He’s always on the scene and his fire engine’s red and clean….it’s Fireman Roo. Today, the Fire Brigade Museum were having an Open Day and Reuben is in a particularly NEE-NAWy phase, so we went along (see, I promised you this morning that I’d get off my arse!). It was billed as a family fun day, so I was a bit disappointed in the lack of things for kids to actually do. Roo was perfectly happy just being in the vicinity of a fire engine and joyously calling out “nee naw nee naw” but imagine how excited he’d have been if he’d been allowed on one?! There was some kinda H&S reason why not apparantly.

There was also a very lovely FireDog, that Roo stroked in a suprisingly gentle way. And kept running back to see, even after FireDoggy had been allowed to retreat to his cage in the FireDoggyWagon (I think that’s the technical term). I would go as far as to say that FireDog was Roo’s personal highlight so maybe we should have just gone to see a dog (I believe there are Men you can see about these things). Or got him his own dog….

Sorry, I drifted off there. I was thinking about dogs. So, to the museum itself. It looked very interesting but I got no time whatsoever to read or look anything as Roo rushed through the whole place in two minutes flat. It was all a bit “look, don’t touch” which my hands-y toddler struggled with but I think it’d be great for older kids. The collection of vintage fire engines was similarly interesting but hands-off. As with the tanks at the Imperial War Museum, they could really do with something that kids can just clamber over. It doesn’t need to be a genuine relic. There were also some firefighter uniforms to try on,which were fun but chained to a wall so Roo discarded them as soon as he discovered he couldn’t move. He’s not one for standing still and/or being chained to walls (not that we chain him to walls, no no).

VERDICT: Interesting for older kids but not ideal for toddlers. Worth checking out if they have another Open Day, purely for the being-in-the-vicinity-of-a-nee-naw excitement but if they’re that crazy about fire engines, take them to the one in Battersea Park Children’s Zoo

More details here (official website)

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All these things that I’ve done – a cheeky piece of cross-posting/plugging

Posted on August 5, 2011 by katese11

You likey this blog, hey? You wanna hear more about the best slides and paddling pools within easy reach of the SE11 area? Well, why not check out this article I’ve written on the links between a dodgy Nigerian pastor and the Evangelical Church of the mid-90s? here

It’s easily the most serious thing I’ve written on the interweb for a long time. And curiously specific. If that’s not your cup of tea (and Christians do love their tea), then maybe you’d fancy some of my spoof articles on thespoof.com. Some child-related, some not…
Google named as third party in divorce settlement
Service sector workers to be given new performance targets
British Government Running Out of Things to Declare War On
 Cameron admits advisor appointment was a “disastrous decision”
Milkoholism “on rise” among young people

and !TOO HOT FOR TV! the one that didn’t make it onto thespoof for being too controversial – CBeebies Presenter in sweary tirade shocker

Phew! That feels better….glad to have got it out of my system. Promise I won’t do that again anytime soon….

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Kennington Park

Posted on August 5, 2011 by katese11

Another local-y one. I will get off my arse and go somewhere more exciting soon, promise. We darn near went to the Natural History Museum the other day but the queues were horrendous, so it was the Science Museum instead. And turns out, you CAN blog too much about one place…!

I’ve realised that, with all these local tips, and the handy map it would be very easy to work out where we lived and stalk us. Well, all I’ll say to that is that I’ve only been cyber-stalked once (my Friends Reunited page was used to find out where I worked, so that tells you how long ago this was) and if you’re that person, then it’s easier all round if you don’t even try to find me. Anyone else, well you’re welcome to my hood any time 🙂

So, Kennington Park – another mainstay for us. And for a South London park, just off the A3 it’s really not bad. A decent amount of green space (from my house and back plus a couple of laps =5k. Not that I’ve counted or anything) and a nice play area with a sandpit, see-saws and a couple of slides. And the bus! (see above). Toppest of top tips – don’t go to this park when the bus is being repainted. Sure, it looks all nice and shiny now (better than it does in the photo above) but whoever put up the fence around it when it was closed didn’t quite think it through. If I was the fence-building type, I’d imagine I’d try not to leave a gap at the bottom that a toddler could fit through. I’m not the fence building type so I can’t judge but needless to say, Roo spotted the weak spot instantly and was under the fence in a jiffy. After being hauled out by the nappy (always dignified), he returned with a friend and was back under. The friend got shouted at by his mother, there were many tears and I wondered why it was always my boy leading the others astray.

Moving swiftly on, what else is there? Well, a nice cafe with space for buggies where I used to go after baby group (y’know, the days when he would just sit in my arms quietly…). They do both fruit tea and soya milk, for my virtuous days . And ice cream too, for my less virtuous days. There’s a nature walk too, although when me and Nathan visited a few years back the only nature we spotted was a rough-looking dog and a pair of pants. Reports have suggested that other, rarer, types of nature have been spotted there too, including “wino”, “pigeon” and “drug dealer”. Worth a look, I reckon.

Ah, but I can’t slag it off too much. We had Roo’s first birthday party there and many other social occasions. There’s a big portuguese barbeque once a year and various other festivals. Just probably best avoided after dark….

More details here (official website)

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Splish splash! Swimming with a toddler in South London

Posted on August 3, 2011 by katese11

Another generic post but a nice one for a hot day, no? We’ve done a fair bit of swimming around the South London area (not literally swimming around South London…unless you believe that made-for -TV movie “Flood”. “Sir, if we don’t act fast, the people of Lewisham will perish”. Cue guffaws), so here’s a round up. The leisure centres mentioned are mostly the same as the ones in the soft play post but I am in no way recycing material. No no.

So, Camberwell to start with. This is a pool I have fond memories of, from the time when we lived down the road and proximity was a more important factor in choosing a pool than, say, basic hygiene. Back then it was a crumbling Victorian relic – full of character but also full of bits of plaster that have fallen off the walls. Not to mention the plasters that have fallen off people’s feet….Now, it’s been refurbished. It’s pretty (see above), they’ve kept the Victorian features and they’ve added a new cafe with Starbucks coffee (in Camberwell! I know!!) as well as flashy new changing rooms. Everything was well designed for ease of toddler handling and the showers were a reasonable temperature (i.e. not scalding hot a la Brixton). We went there for “Jelly Babies” which involved a lot of duckies and floats in the baby pool and which Reuben loved. Obviously, he tried to gather all the duckies up for himself by dint of snatching them from smaller children but that’s a toddler’s perogative, right? Definitely one to re-visit.

More details here (official website)

Next up, the old faithful Brixton. Not as bad as it sounds, honestly! Yes, you have to disappear up a less than salubrious alleyway in order to get a pushchair up there. Yes, the receptionists will ignore you until they feel like selling you a ticket. And yes, the view from the pool is directly on to the train line (great for a toddler boy, less great for people who don’t like commuters waving at them as they swim). But it’s not bad. The changing rooms are relatively new, there are big family changing rooms and a buggy park. And MASSIVE lockers, which is always nice. The family shower is scalding hot (as discussed) and the changing rooms are a touch on the cold side but fine other than that. The pool itself is pretty clean  and the adult lane swimming is separate from a shallower bit and a separate baby pool. Fine as a regular local haunt.

More details here (official website)

So, to Peckham? Have only been there once with Roo so can’t remember much about it. Pretty clean and modern, pretty sure I used the wrong changing room (disabled rather than family…hey, it just said “accessible”. Don’t be so politically correct if you don’t wanna confuse people). Some kind of complicated system with bands where you had to choose between main pool and baby pool when you paid. In general, too much thinking…

More details here (official website)

Battersea next…They say when you’ve had a traumatic experience somewhere, it can lie in your subconcious until you return to the scene of the incident. Is that why Roo insisted on screaming constantly when we took him back to Battersea, scene of Waterbabygate? Roo never got on with Water Babies. As lovely and baby-led as their philosophy was, there was just something about the classes that made Reuben very upset. Maybe it was the dunking under the water. Maybe it was the fact that we went in winter and it ws snowing almost every week. Out of his 10 weeks as a Water Baby (well, the 7 weeks we made it to. Look, it was snowing A LOT! And I started work again around week 8…), he earned a single commendation and that was for the “clinging to the side exercise”. The instructor made all the other Water Babies look at just how well Reuben did it…

Anyhoo, there’s nothing at all wrong with the place itself. The changing rooms are warm, even when there’s snow outside, and were refurbished around the time of Roo’s Water Babies career (that was another super-fun factor). The baby pool seems to be out of bounds for general public use but there’s a graduated beach-type entry to the main pool as well as an elephant water slide and a wave machine. It really is nice, it’s just gonna take a while for Roo to make his peace with it…

More details here (official website)

And that’s it for the ones I’ve tried with Reuben. There’s Seven Islands as well but based on a single experience in 2006 ish, I wouldn’t reommend it (flaking decor, blood on the changing room floor) and Elephant & Castle leisure centre definitely does NOT have a pool. If you turn up there with your towel as I did, they will laugh at you. And they would be within their rights…

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The rest of Battersea Park

Posted on July 31, 2011 by katese11

There’s nothing like a bit of controversy and Battersea Park is nothing if not controversial. It’s home to the Adventure Playground that made it into the national news for charging £2.50 per person. Britain truly was Disgusted of SW11. But guess what? We went there and used the playground right next to the adventure playground and didn’t have to pay. Now, there’s sticking it to the man.

Calling this post “The rest of Battersea Park” is a tad optimistic, seeing as the place is huuuuge and I can’t claim to have conquered even half of it. But here’s what I’ve gleaned from various trips.  First of all, it has ducks. Loads of them. And a lake that you could *lose a toddler in* if you were careless. Cough. Listen, it was only the once and only the soles of his shoes got wet. Pretty good going, considering. Walk past the lake – keep going, going some more, that’s it, ooh duckies! What noise does a duckie make? No, it’s cows that go moo, you’re getting confused, keep walking – and you get to a rather nice sub-tropical garden. It’s a bit too nice if your toddler is prone to flower picking but never mind…

Keep going a little further, through some woodland, and there it is! The controversial adventure playground. But wait, you only have to pay for the older kids bit? Well, that’s fine then. Their parents don’t have to pay for childcare or nappies. And if you live in Battersea, surely you earn the same as a small Eastern European nation anyway? I know, slippery slope etc – Tory government, charging for kids’ facilities, soon we’ll be taxed to leave our own front doors…but let’s get this in perspective. It’s an adventure playground. If they stuck it indoors and called it a soft play, no-one would flinch at paying for it.

Anyways, back to the matter in hand – the free playground. And very good it was too. A number of different areas for different age groups (mainly sign posted), lots of slides and frames to climb on. In the toddler area, there’s a play train and a play car. Of course, Reuben ignored these things and went straight for the big boys’ frame but what else would you expect?
Next to the park, there’s also a very good (also free) one o clock club, which has an awesome Austin Powers style bachelor pad stimulation room., complete with water bed and lava lamps.We’ve been there a lot of times and would recommend it, unlike the boating lake which we’ve never tried but hey, I’ll recommend it anyway!

VERDICT: One of the best parks in London- lots to do and lots of open space.

More details here (official website)

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