The Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor - Unity Theatre, Liverpool

Went to the Unity Theatre (off Hope Street in Liverpool) to see 'The Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor'.  We'd won family tickets as a prize in the Liverpool Cathedral Photography Competition.
This was a simple, but really clever and effective production involving a handful of actors, a few props, light and smoke effects and a some puppetry.

We all thoroughly enjoyed it.  The boys were on the edge of their seats as we watched Sinbad and his crew get swallowed by a giant whale, outwit a terrible giant, fight with the Roc (giant bird) and it's hatchling, summon the Genie of the Ring, sword fight and ride on a flying carpet.  All taking place non-digitally right in front of our eyes.
When a magic word opened the door to a treasure trove Samwise caused some laughter when he exclaimed "That's not treasure, it's a smoke machine!".  He still voted the play 'best thing ever' in the taxi on the way home.

We All Live in a Yellow Submarine

Of course we don't, but we have discovered a new kids themed activity centre called Yellow Sub.

Samwise went there for his last day of Nursery School treat on Thursday. We decided to go again on Sunday morning, and take Frodo along too.

It's in a converted warehouse in Brunswick Dock, so the apparatus is about 20 feet high at the very top. This makes the slides a bit daunting for the smaller kids. Samwise was OK with the long blue slide on Friday, however on Sunday they seem to have polished it a bit, so children were flying down the slide and then off the end - which put him off a bit.

He didn't like the idea of the vertical spiral snake slide - although Frodo had no trouble at all with this on Sunday, and did about 30 circuits of the apparatus to go down this one.

The equipment is all fairly new. I think that they've only been open for a few months, plus it's off the beaten track with nothing else about other than warehouses, so a lot of people haven't discovered it yet.

The smaller children's area is a lot better equipped than most, including a touch screen computer and a small "little tykes" car racing track. Samwise found this a good area to rest in when he'd had enough on the big apparatus. Super vigilant staff wouldn't let Frodo into this area - fair enough I suppose if they're trying to stop the boisterous older kids from knocking the younger ones over.

They serve decent coffee (we had a couple of lattes), cakes and croissants. The breakfast menu is a little pretentious, but not too pricey. I tried the Manx Kippers - which for £2.50 turned out to be what looked like a "boil in the bag" kipper with a quartered slice of buttered toast. It was quite tasty though.

The only downside was that we usually take our own bottles of water for the kids to drink. As we left the chap on the door (who I believe might also be the owner or manager) pointed out to us that for our future reference no food or drink is allowed to be brought in. We could buy bottles of water from their restaurant area.
Bringing your own water isn't a problem with other similar places that we go to. For future reference we'll make sure that any bottles we may have aren't visible when we leave ;-)

Imaginative Play

Work went OK yesterday and the system is up and running well.

Got back home to find Frodo and Samwise charging around the house brandishing guns fashioned from lego bricks and waving a small battery powered torch/radio. "We're Superhero Explorers" said Samwise.

The game changed to "Monsters on the ceiling" - inspired by Saturday night's Dr Who episode, and then finally "Pirates looking for treasure".

I pointed out to Pirate Samwise that he didn't have a treasure map. He went off to find a Pirate Activity Colouring book, which Pirate Frodo coloured in to make the map.

Pirate Frodo's bed became the pirate ship. I had to board it, sink it and capture Pirate Samwise in order to get them to bed.