It’s been a pretty quiet couple of weeks, with both Alex and I suffering from colds.  Never seen so many tissues used by so few people!  Despite all the coughing and sneezing, we’ve had a lovely January so far – exploring some more local attractions as a family which is always fun.

Last weekend, we followed a tip off from a friend, and headed off early on Saturday morning to the National Army Museum in Chelsea.  We’d heard that they had a good, new children’s play area – and it was certainly true!  With restricted one hour slots to prevent the room getting too busy, we thankfully managed to get into the second session of the day.  Alex loved every minute – exploring the entire soft play all by himself and getting super excited by the tunnels and slides.  It was great to see him being so confident and independent, and playing with other children.  Cute!  He wasn’t quite old enough to enjoy the dressing up area, but he also loved the play table with little cars, tanks and trains!

We took the opportunity to have a quick look around the excellent War Horse exhibition as well.  It was a great little museum, and we’ll definitely be back – would highly recommend their kid’s zone to other London friends with little ones.    Here’s Alex contemplating a career as a peace campaigner:

Today we tried out another local kid’s play area – the Play Zone at Brixton Rec Centre.  I can’t quite believe we’ve never been there before because it was absolutely brilliant.  A huge softplay frame in a massive room, Alex was able to climb up all of it – and we could go too as it was lovely and spacious.  Considering it was a Sunday morning, it was really quiet, and we easily stayed for over an hour.

Here’s Alex very bravely making his way across a little rope bridge (it took him a few attempts to pluck up the courage!)

After we’d worn Alex out in the softplay, we explored the little Brixton farmers market (yum) where Alex ate an embarrassing amount of the sample food and then headed into Dulwich Village for a scrummy Italian lunch.  It’s days like today that remind me quite how much I love living in South London.  I don’t understand why people move out of town when they have children – I can’t imagine a more diverse and exciting range of things for Alex to do than we have on our doorstep here in central London!

In other news, Alex is enjoying all his fabulous Christmas present toys.  He’s completely in love with his first brio train set, both his London buses (!) and his electric guitar.  We’re now trying to get Alex interested in duplo (mostly because Matt and I LOVE lego, and the quicker we can get him into that the better!) – but at the moment, he just loves tipping the entire box over the floor:

Classes are back up and running after the Christmas holiday – and Alex has already been back enjoying baby booters (football for toddlers!), baby bop (music for toddlers) and gymboree!  I’m very excited because Hummy Mummies (a choir for mum’s where children can roam around the rehearsals) is opening a new class on a Monday afternoon – so we’ll be doing that from February.  Hooray – singing again!