Tending the Vegetable Patch: Robots and Me

We have had a concentration of robots today, some orchestrated by myself, but as always we follow the smalls lead and if they are interested we go with it and if not we move on to the next thing. We had a planned visit to the Lightbox in Woking after a tip off from a fellow home ed friend. The exhibition finishes this week so it was now or never to catch those robots and feed Pumpkin some new material for his robot interest.

We have never driven that way before so a bit of route planning and food supply at the ready plus in car entertainment we made our way very successfully into the unknown. We took a copy of The Iron Man to listen to in the car and drove through Surrey countryside and farmland on our way. Pumpkin noted that 'he [the iron man] could live here,' it was a great setting to listen to the story.

The exhibition itself did not disappoint. The staff were incredibly friendly and helpful (one guy even gave me instructions on how to use the lift.....it was just a lift!) The boys spotted robots that the have seen before, Rodney Copperbottom and a storm trooper and R2D2 amongst others plus a life size darlek. Bean was particularly taken with the War of the Worlds posters and alien structure, which was were the exhibition had grown from as HG Wells wrote War of the Worlds based in Surrey.

We also went to see an animals in art exhibition which suited Plum nicely as most of the animals were ones that she recognised in sculptures and paintings. The boys were both into the interactive parts today with lots of game playing and dressing up and drawing. We had to pay the robots a second visit before we left.

On the way home we stopped at a play park that we had passed on the journey there and the smalls were interested in investigating. It was an all age play park with adult exercise equipment too. It was lots of fun. Bean navigated the journey home with the help of google maps app. It's very useful to have a route so clearly marked and your vehicle placed on the route and so easy for him to see if we take a wrong turn. But today he was able to tell me when a turn was approaching and which way to go and was reading landmarks like bridges and rivers and train lines from the map. He even told me at one point that it didn't matter if we went the wrong way because the roads join up and we could just follow thins one and this one and join back up with the road we are supposed to be on. Amazing.

The rest of the afternoon was spent watching 'Robots' which rounded our day off perfectly, only to be topped by the moment when mummy and the smalls ate chocolate pudding and mummy said "don't tell daddy we had chocolate pudding as there is non left for him," and Bean split his into two and gave back the larger portion so daddy could have some. Heart melting moment.