One of the best parts of being in the blogging community is meeting some of the other great bloggers out there. I met Jenni from Museum Diary a few times over the past couple of years, and have always admired her dedication to not only get out and about to museums, but also to make sure that kids enjoy them too.
We did a little interview over on Museum Diary for Jenni’s new “Meet a Museum Family” series about how our family does museums when we’re here in the city or out on travels (hint: we talk about our favorites a lot) – take a peek!
When you travel with toddlers, to visit friends with toddlers, not surprisingly, your travel itinerary tends to be geared a bit more towards toddlers, and that was definitely the case when we visited our friends in Dublin a couple of weekends ago.
Luckily, our friends are seasoned pros when it comes to toddlers, and while the visit was short (much too short for my liking – Dublin and Ireland, you are on my list to return to!), we managed to pack in an entirely new playground each of the three days we were there. And each one had their own special flavor and proximity to “extras” that were just as entertaining for the parents, which means that these were winners all around.
1. St. Stephen’s Green: We were told that if you could only see one thing in Dublin, St. Stephen’s Green should be it. Not only is it a beautiful park right in the middle of the city, but it’s got a great playground right in the middle. Now, Copenhagen is home to some pretty amazing playgrounds, but one of the things you notice pretty quickly when you have kids here is that nearly all playgrounds are based in dark sand, which means you’re guaranteed a load of laundry (or two) by the time you get home. This playground is outfitted with softer matting instead, making it possible to play your heart out and still look respectable for your fish’n’chips luncheon at the local pub. The playground is laid out in a graduated fashion, so there are groups of structures and activities for kids to enjoy regardless of their size, and scattered benches that allow parents to take a load off. As a bonus, the entry to St. Stephen’s Green is right off of Grafton Street, which means you can do a little busker entertainment and window shopping on your way over. And if you start on Suffolk Street by Trinity, you can pop by the Avoka main store, pick up a few Irish blankets to take home, and a pack up some phenomenal baked treats and salad boxes from their cafe in the basement for a lunch on the green.
2. Herbert Park:Right between the Ballsbridge and Donnybrook neighborhoods is a huge expanse of green space called Herbert Park. Our friends live just around the corner and I have to say, it’s pretty prime toddler space. The park itself is huge, with a lovely pavilion area and ducks and swans which makes for a nice walk (or run for the ambitious) at pretty much any time of day. The playground is expansive, with lots of climbing structures and a base of wood chips, which is also something we don’t find here in Copenhagen. What was nice about this one, was how many people seemed to know each other and each other’s children – it has a really nice neighborhood feel to it.
3. Dun Laoghaire Market + Playground: This one is a little outside of Dublin with a quick ride on the local transit, but in a toddler’s eyes, it has it all: a train ride! the sea! ice cream! It only took me the entire train ride to figure out that Dun Laoghaire is pronounced “dunnleary”…and suddenly I remembered that this was where some of the characters in Circle of Friends lived (three cheers for Maeve Binchy! ) which made me love it even more. On Sundays, Dun Laoghaire hosts a big open air food stall market: crepes, pad thai, falafel…they’re all on the menu – as are beautiful farm fresh eggs, soda bread and cookies the size of your head. But don’t use up all your dessert chips just yet – after a lunch to everyone’s taste on the lawn (where you may get treated to an impromptu choir performance), head over to the playground (crowded but fun!) to work it off. Once everyone has had their fill, you can follow the road down to Teddy’s for ice cream, a bit of a local institution. We had to head back after that for our flight, but if we had more time, a nice walk on the water would have been an even more perfect ending.
So that’s the scoop on Dublin playgrounds – again, we were only there for a weekend so I’m sure there is much more out there. For those that have visited or lived in Dublin with little ones, feel free to add your suggestions about playgrounds or other great things to do with toddlers in the comments below!
There it was…that unmistakable shimmer…that piece of glittery polyester that catches the sunlight just so…the princess dress. Yep, princess dresses are here, even amongst the forest schoolers. Just because you wear rain boots full of mud and carry sticks in your free hands, doesn’t meant there isn’t room in your heart and your imagination for tiaras and sparkle and tutus.
When we first started forest school, all the kids were dressed so practically, so efficiently, that I started thinking to myself that we’ll somehow escape the princess phenomenon. I could bypass the layers of tulle that were purportedly teaching our young ladies to look for suitors instead of educations, the swags of satin that clouded our girls’ eyes with promises of fairy tales instead of self-reliance… No, I told myself, here there would be hard work! There would be resilience! And the layers wouldn’t be of tulle, they would be of wind-resistant, waterproof gore-tex!
But on Fridays, when “toy time” would roll around (when the kids are allowed to bring basically whatever they want from home to show and tell and play with), I saw sneaky, gauzy fabric peeking out from out of all that wind and water resistance… As it turns out, there is a place for princesses in the forest school, too.
And why wouldn’t there be? Snow White took up residence in the woods in a collective cottage arrangement…Ariel lived in the ocean, just like Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid. And when the Frozen phenomenon hit, well, that was practically Scandinavia in a nutshell. And for the record, the boys are no different with their own corresponding toys: sabres and swords (and plenty of other things that could poke out an eye), shields and dragons…Children naturally gravitate to certain outlets for their imagination.
I remember reading in Peter Gray’s Free to Learn that children often play out and act out things that they might otherwise be processing for themselves. For example, when children pretend to fight monsters, they don’t do it to be violent, but because they can try it in a safe space during daylight, amongst friends, so that when you find yourself alone, at night you’re not afraid. If children are gravitating towards these things, then there must be something that they’re trying to figure out.
So while my original instinct as a parent might have been to fear what the princess parade might mean, being part of the forest school has let us embrace it a bit. For every toy time that my daughter brings a tiara to, there’s a corresponding toy time where she’s chosen to bring a flashlight or her doctor’s kit or a puzzle. She doesn’t think being a princess is a career or a destination, she just thinks it’s a fun game.
And those layers of tulle and swags of satin? Those are well-earned by these girls. So are the tutus and the mornings I catch her digging around in my make-up drawer. And don’t forget the face paint either. These girls are princesses that climb trees and roll down hills and wade through mud bogs, proving to themselves over and over and over again that you can do just about anything in a skirt that you can in pants. It’s not about saying “play with this” or “don’t play with that”. It is about letting children adapt all of these things for their own learning and to make their own rules – it’s about letting them have an imagination. After all, you’re only a child once; why not let them enjoy everything that world entails?
Often times when I tell people our toddler is in forest school,they wonder how the toddlers actually get to the forest. Some think that we just leave our kids out in the woods all the time, some think that we must drive miles into the deep groves of trees…”Sounds great, ” they always say, and follow it up with a statement about how they would never have time to have such a complicated morning routine.
The truth is, a forest school drop-off doesn’t necessarily have to be anymore complicated than any other school drop-off. In our case, we have a building drop-off structure, which is about a mile and change from our home. This meeting point building serves as the central location for drop-off and pick-up. In our case, we’re pretty lucky because said building is right next to the train and bus lines, and where we live there is already a fair amount of forest space. So the kids from our program either take public transportation or rely on the good work of their own too feet to get around, and things are already closer. Every once in a blue moon they might take a chartered bus somewhere if it’s a more complex outing, but that’s rare. After all, the point isn’t to scale Everest here (good thing too as Denmark is about as flat as a sheet of paper) but rather, to be outside, whether it’s 5 feet away or 5 miles away.
For forest schools that are based in the city, they might do something similar, or they might have a structure where a chartered bus meets them every morning to take them out to the woods and then return. That avoids some of the public transportation, but that also means that if you miss the bus in the morning, you literally miss the bus. Those schools tends to be a little more organized on departure times, whereas ours is pretty flexible. You still have to be there at a certain time of course, but the kids have a fair amount of flexibility on how the day is planned out in terms of getting around and getting back, which they can adjust pretty quickly if for whatever reason there is a weather change, or a few kids aren’t feeling 100%…(side note: kids have to be pretty sick here in order to get sent home. As a result of being outside all of the time, most forest school kids rarely gets sick but it does happen that colds and such can make the rounds. If the school finds that one or a few of the kids aren’t feeling so hot, they usually just come up with an easier schedule or slower pace – but if kids are really out of sorts, then they will definitely call).
One of the other unexpected benefits of this all has been that our daughter has become pretty comfortable on public transportations of all kinds. She knows all the train announcements by heart, and has a good sense of getting on and off trains and buses and the like. It’s not uncommon to see kids getting around town independently here – either on their bikes, or on public transportation. When you see how early they start them, it starts to make more sense. After all, getting yourself from point A to point B is a life skill, regardless if it’s in the wilds of the forest or the deepest of urban jungles.
that children often play out and act out things that they might otherwise be processing for themselves. For example, when children pretend to fight monsters, they don’t do it to be violent, but because they can try it in a safe space during daylight, amongst friends, so that when you find yourself alone, at night you’re not afraid. If children are gravitating towards these things, then there must be something that they’re trying to figure out.
