My girls are at an age where they are very into Legos. They spend hours every week coming up with new creations, breaking them apart and starting new. Legos were a big part of my childhood and it's fun to see the enjoyment being passed down. I love seeing their creativity at work. So when we heard the world's biggest Lego store had recently opened in central London, we decided we must go check it out.
When we arrived at the store, we quickly realized that many other Londoners and tourists also had the store on their "must-do" list because the queue of people waiting to getting in stretched on and on. After a 45 minute wait in line, we finally got in and it did not disappoint! The store had everything from a 4 foot high Queen Elizabeth to a replica of Big Ben nearly 20 feet tall to an almost full size underground train carriage all made out of Legos.
Hi Queen!
Big Ben, which is built with over 200,000 Lego pieces and took approximately 2,300 hours to complete! The face of the clock is also fully working. It's incredible!
This lego skyline of London below contains over 265,000 pieces. You can't really tell from the photo, but the mural is in 3D to give it depth and is much larger in real life than it looks in the photo, stretching the lengths of two walls.
Just riding the Tube, holding hands with Shakespeare
Of course, the store also contained every possible Lego building set you could want including some very complicated ones recommended for adults 18 years and older. And I thought Legos were just for kids!
Knowing that our time in the UK was likely going to be ending in 2017, Geoff and I started discussing over the summer if there any final destinations we wanted to travel to. Geoff mentioned Dubai as a possibility and after a little thought, it made sense. Dubai is a destination we would never travel to once settled back into the US so we figured it was now or never. So while the girls were on a two week holiday from school back in October, we boarded an Emirates A380 airplane (which is huge...a full upper deck!) for the seven hour flight for the shiny destination of Dubai.
Our destination for our five days there was the Palm Atlantis, situated on the top of a man-made island in the shape of a palm tree. If you've never seen images of this incredible engineering feat, do yourself a favor and go google it. It really is incredible. The resort was amazing! It reminded me of hotels in Las Vegas...massively big, over-the-top, lots of restaurants, lots of people, staff that caters to everything and of course, expensive! 😟
The view from our hotel room by day...
...and by night.
Below is a photo of the resort beach with the Burj Al Arab Jumeriah in the background which is dubbed as the world's most luxurious hotel. With standard rooms going for around $2,000 per night, also probably one of the world's most expensive hotels! I don't think we will be making any return trips to stay there anytime soon. Or ever!
Our itinerary for our trip was swimming, swimming and more swimming! We never left the resort. Our time was split between the hotel swimming pool and the water park attached to the resort. From the moment we arrived, all the girls wanted to do was be in the water and with hot temps (in the mid to upper 90s degrees), we were happy to oblige.
The waterpark had a kids section that was perfect for us. There were some little slides that Ashton loved going on repeatedly and some larger ones for Olivia. Quinn was happy to sit in the wading pool and splash around. In the rest of the park, there was a lazy river we rode around on a few times and Geoff and I occasionally took turns leaving to go on some more adults oriented rides, but primarily we stayed in the children's part until it was time to leave and switch to the hotel swimming pool.
If she wasn't on a waterslide, this is where Olivia could be found
Adjacent to the waterpark, the resort had a dolphin experience you could do. Geoff and the girls signed up for their chance to get up close and personal with a dolphin.
One of the restaurants had a chocolate foundation for dessert and I thought the girls' eyes were going to pop out of their heads when they saw it. Without our good parental oversight, they would have skipped dinner entirely and headed straight for the fountain.
Quinn looking on with envy.
The chocolate fountain and dipping nibbles were so good they made your teeth fall out! Not quite, but Olivia did have a tooth fall out while she was eating her chocolate goodness.
It's hard to define trips with three little children as relaxing but this trip ending up being as close as we could get. Lots of down time soaking in the sun and playing in the water made for a very enjoyable time!
As a parting gesture, on our way to the airport we drove near the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, with a whopping 163 floors!
While everyone is decking the halls, I'll just have a quick flashback moment to Halloween 2016. Our Halloween family theme this year was superheros because I decided I couldn't handle another year with the girls dressed up as princesses. Fortunately, they were eager to help me select their costumes online and even more excited when they arrived. I had caped crusaders jumping around our house for days. I also had glitter ALL OVER THE HOUSE for days from their sparkly superhero skirts.
For the fourth year in a row, we went to the Hampstead Women's Club's Halloween parade. All the children (approximately 50 of them) walked up and down a few blocks of the Hampstead High Street, stopping at various locations along the way to pick out treats.
Quinn, I mean Spiderman, was ready for Halloween action this year compared to last Halloween when he was only 9 days old.
The parade is always followed by a movie at the local cinema. The movie playing this year was Hotel Transylvania 2. Since my girls are not into movies, this is our once a year visit to the cinema. I never know how they are going to do but both Ashton and Olivia sat in attention for most of the movie minus a few scary parts when Olivia started complaining that she was tired and wanted to go home. Thankfully Quinn slept.
Keeping in Superhero shape...
We did go out trick-or-treating on Halloween itself and here is my one lone picture from the evening We got a bit of a late start so many of the houses were already out of candy and the girls quickly reached their limit, saying they didn't want anymore candy (gasp!) and just wanted to go home.
Alrighty, now that the Halloween blog post is done, stay tuned for my Christmas posts coming in say, about 2-3 months! :)
when you starting seeing lots of pictures on social media with kids in pumpkin patches.
And now it's the Streit family's turn. After taking a hiatus from the pumpkin patch scene for the last five years (here is our last pumpkin patchvisit when Olivia was only one!), we decided to rent a car to drive outside of London to visit Willow Farm and their pumpkin festival.
Olivia had previously been to Willows Farm on a school field trip but for the rest of us, this was our first visit. What a fun place! Lots of animals to see and pet, pig races, a magic show, tractor rides, tons of outdoor and indoor playgrounds/softplay and carnival-type rides for the kids.
Oh my goodness. This boy is a heartbreaker!
Lastly, it was time to choose our pumpkins so we headed for the fields. Olivia and Ashton excitedly ran around trying to locate the biggest ones they could find, while Geoff inspected to make sure they weren't rotting out. Meanwhile, I tried to take photos of Quinn in the patch and he tried to eat dirt and grass.
Note to self: next time you want to get a cute picture of the kids and their pumpkins, don't place them looking directly into the sun.
