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Easter Fun

Now that I am an adult, Easter usually just seems a bit of a pain in the butt rather than something to look forward to. Whilst I love how excited my little guy gets and the fact that it’s the first year he has known what the Easter Bunny is, it’s just more money and lot of chocolate which sucks when you are trying to lose weight! I wanted to try do something fun however and actually turn it in to a nice weekend and quite quickly our laid back weekend ended up being quite a busy one.

Friday was just spent doing things in the house, nothing special really but just tidying up and tidying up the garden a bit, so you could say it was a bit boring but we were quite busy. We planned to do fun stuff on the Saturday and we didn’t want to spend money on Friday with things already planned this weekend. The following day we got up quite early, went to my parent’s house to stay for the night. When we got there my mum and I popped straight out to go buy some last bits for the wedding that we still needed. After a mad dash we headed back to their house to get the rest of the family (the Mr, my dad and little guy) and we headed to Durham to start a day of fun.

We went for some food at Chiquito and I hadn’t been there in absolutely ages. It was pretty busy (as was everywhere else) and we were quite limited on time to eat so we took a risk and hoped the food would come in time. Luckily it arrived with 10 mins to shove it down our necks and then we were off to the Gala theatre to go see a show. The food was really nice and we did order lots so how we managed it in such a short space of time with out feeling ill I honestly don’t know. There was definitely no time for desserts though!

We went to see Dinosaur world at the Gala since our little man seems to be really in to Dinosaurs right now. The show was for age 3+ so I hoped it would be ok for him. He always asks to watch documentaries on dinosaurs and watches walking with dinosaurs, none of the kids cartoon stuff! He watches them on repeat nearly every day and when I bought him a dinosaur toy, I was very impressed to hear my 3 year old say, I love my Tyrannosaurus-Rex mummy. That seems to be the only dinosaur he really knows but at 3 that is a rather impressive word!

At first when the Dinosaur show started it was just a woman on stage talking and I instantly panicked thinking he would be bored and not enjoy it but after the first 10 – 15 mins of talking was done they started to introduce the ‘dinosaurs’ which instantly got his attention. The puppets were really good and it was entertaining from an adults perspective watching the puppeteers moving them around and looking rather funny. Obviously for a child they didn’t even notice this but watching the people moving their bodies with the dinosaurs did provide a lot of laughs for us, and the sounds they made were entertaining too.

My main worry aside from my toddler being bored was him being scared. We were sat towards the back so he wasn’t right in front of them but it did still worry me in case he found them scary. They started with the smaller ones and then they brought in a very big rather scary looking T-Rex which surprisingly he was pretty OK with. He really liked it and now and again there would be a very loud noise that would have him jump a little but he just laughed, got excited and shouted from his seat. He joined in with shouting out names and singing songs too which was very cute.

The actress on stage kept getting kids up to get involved and every time little man would put his hand up but they only ever picked kids from the front. I am aware they were seats that had a different price and were sold out very quickly but I felt just picking a child to come up would have been better rather than keep asking all the kids in the room to raise their hand. You could see them all enthusiastically raising their hand and every time looking disheartened whenever someone from the same row was picked and nowhere near them. It didn’t spoilt it for him though and he laughed lots and seemed pretty happy watching whilst munching on chocolates.

After the show all the kids got to meet some of the dinosaurs. I was hoping you could take a photo with them but they just wanted everyone to meet them together and you got to have a quick stroke of them. Reid was very confident about doing this and although he was a bit jumpy when the first one came towards him he kind of panicked and then laughed and wanted to do it again. It dawned on me that he genuinely believes he was stroking a real dinosaur. I don’t know why that didn’t really occur to me, but I realised that he really thought that was a dinosaur, even though you could see a person’s legs sticking out underneath! So he was extremely brave if he thought he was petting a real dinosaur!

We went out in to the foyer at the end to go see some of the smaller dinosaurs and he went to go meet the baby T-Rex and show him is toy T-Rex that he brought with him to watch the show (bless) This dinosaur was a lot more energetic and they really did keep the act up which did scare my little one a bit. They seemed to really go at him every time he went to go give it a stroke and he got quite panicked. I know they needed to keep it going for all the other kids but I just thought if you could see a kid was getting a bit scared and just wanted to quickly give it a stroke then why wouldn’t you just get the dinosaur to focus on the other children whilst he stroked the back. Every time he went near it and started to get a bit of confidence they had the little T-Rex lunge forward and right in his face and he was just small compared to other kids. Luckily he wasn’t too affected by it however but I felt sorry for him a little bit as he was so excited to show the dinosaur his similar toy.

The Dinosaur show was really good and I think it was fine for his age but I would say that they could reduce some of the talking a bit and do more fun stuff with the dinosaur puppets. Maybe some tricks and more funny entertaining stuff. I do think the length of the show which was 45 minutes was a good length and didn’t drag on too much. It would have been good to have a few more dinosaurs in there too and have them out a bit longer but it was a great little show for dinosaur mad children. The tickets were £12.50 each and I do think that they could have been reduced a bit for adults. I know you are watching too but really it isn’t aimed at adults and apart from giggling at things that probably weren’t meant to be funny it wasn’t something you would go to see without a kid. So that is the only thing I think maybe should have been reduced a bit as there was 1 toddler and 4 adults so its £62.50 for something that was only really of interest to one of us.

Dinosaur world is touring the UK so if you want to go see it then you can see all the dates here

Once we had left the Gala we decided to go for a walk in Durham to go get some ice cream and a coffee..but not before going on the rowing boats with little guy! He has been desperate to go on the boats so we finally took him on. He absolutely loved it and because he was under 4 he was free and they provided a life jacket which was good. We sandwiched him in between my mum and I whilst his granddad rowed the boat. We sang row row row your boat over and over again and he had a lovely time. I hadn’t been on the boats since I was little and it was quite cute being back on there all grown up with my little one. Daddy wasn’t a fan of boats so he went off and had a pint in the bar nearby whilst we went off in our boat! He got some funny looks on his own with a kids brightly coloured monkey bag having a pint.

After we finished on the boats and we’d had our ice cream and coffee we headed back to the parents house where we played with little guy and chilled for a bit. Quite quickly bed time came for Reid and we then put Britains got talent on and had even more food..and some drinks! We all needed to just relax after a fun filled day and a day with a hyperactive toddler. We sorted the stuff out from the Easter bunny ready for the morning and then I just had to go to bed as I was shattered. Reid slept on a blow up bed in my parent’s room as they said they would get up with him which was nice, however he apparently woke up loads in the night and got up at 6am! My poor mum was exhausted! It must have been from the excitement because he sleeps like a log every night at home.


That following morning the Easter bunny had been! There was a trail outside of eggs hidden and Reid was just so unbelievably excited. We didn’t buy him much at all because we knew that everyone buys him n egg and he ends up with about 20! I just bought him two small toys and 2 eggs but he did still end up with loads as expected. He spent the whole day just eating chocolate and I was convinced he was going to throw up, but no, this kid had no limits. We did make sure he had a wholesome Sunday dinner too but that didn’t really slow him down to be honest!

We spent the Sunday night in our own home but went straight back to my mum and dad’s the next day for some more fun and to try out a mock wedding table which we forgot to do whilst we were there. After that it was back to being boring again and we went straight to do the food shopping and tidy the house again. When the little one had gone to bed we decided to have a picky tea with cheeses, sweet potato fries, crisps and dip and garlic bread. To say I feel ill from the weekend is an understatement! Too much booze and food was consumed and I definitely need a detox!

We managed to fit some fun in this weekend and I am glad that we could take our little one to do something different. It was nice to get out of the house as being self employed and working from home means that I spend a lot of time here and it’s so easy to get in to a trap of carrying on doing things on the laptop when I should probably just put it down and get some fresh air.

 

How did you spend your Easter? Were you tortured by the chocolate too? Did you have a chilled out time or a stressful one? Comment below and tell me :)

 

 

 

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