Planned Holiday Activites for the Children

Here are the planned activities that we have for the remaining weeks of the holidays:

Week starting 7th January:

• Day trip to visit friends.
• Animated kids' classics at ACMI - Animated story time filled with cats and dogs, including the Disney classic Pluto and a Felix the Cat cartoon from the 1920s (free).
• Catching the ferry to Williamstown for a picnic lunch.
• Sleep over number 1. We will have our eldest son's friend come to stay and play and take him along with us to the free movies. We tend to make a day of it by catching the train, taking a packed lunch to eat after the movie, at the playground behind ArtPlay.

Week Starting 14th January:

• A dear friend bought our family tickets to The Wind in the Willows production by the Australian Shakespeare Company. We will be going to this with her family and that of another dear friend. It is on at the Botanical Gardens in Melbourne and we will pack a picnic basket and rug and have a fabulous time.
• Yvonne Audette exhibition at NGV Australia. Yvonne is one of Australia’s most accomplished abstract artists. After checking out her work we will then have a go (for free) at creating our own abstract art at the NGV ArtCart .
• Sleep over number 2. As this will be for the younger of our two sons, we will keep this more simple, when we have a day at home and fill it up with loads of backyard cricket, soccer and time on the trampoline.

Week starting 21st January (eek it's the last week!)

• Day trip to the beach - probably somewhere like Point Leo. We went with friends a week or so ago and had a wonderful time, so will probably head back there.
• Arranged play at the park with our buddy family for next year. As we are an established family at our school we have been allocated a new buddy family to assist them in settling in to the school. We will meet up, so their son can meet my two sons and have some familiar faces on the playground who are older and can look at for him. It is also so the new mum can have a familiar face as well and find out any more info that she may need about starting at the school.
• animalmationKids at ACMI - the older children will be able to participate (for free) in a workshop to create their own animal figure in clay and make it come to life.

It may seem a bit much to go to this level of planning for the school holidays, but my aim is to get a balance of days at home which are "unplanned" in what the kids do and days that have planned activities. Of course given that life with kids is often unpredictable these are not set in stone and if the weather is too hot/wet or if we get a better offer then we change.