Our day in the City.

My brother has been in hospital with the chicken pox this week. Apparently a non-serious disease in kids is really serious in adults. He's on the mend now, but is in a lot of pain and is pretty scabby.

To help him and my sister-in-law out, my parents and I looked after his two girls for a few days. I decided it'd be a good opportunity to take his eldest daughter, Lil and Gigi into the city for the day.

We caught the train into the city, which the girls loved. Lil had never been on a train before and Gigi absolutely loves trains.

On the Train

Dinosaurs at the museum

When we arrived in the city, the weather was overcast with rain showers, so I took the girls over to Southbank to visit the museum.  When I was younger, my Nana would take us to lots of exciting place during the school holidays. One of my favourites was the Queensland Museum. Unfortunately at 4 and 3, Lil and Gigi are a bit too young for the Museum. We wandered around for about an hour, but the girls lost interest pretty quickly.











We had a quick afternoon tea and then headed over to the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) because I'd heard they had a pretty good kids area. There are two kids areas, one on the ground floor and one on the lower ground floor. Both were absolutely brilliant.

Ladies who lunch..

The first area had a construction-type activity where kids could choose to build either an animal, a boat or a tree out of cardboard. Both of the girls wanted to build a boat, so we collected the materials and got to it.

The girls coloured in their cardboard beautifully, then popped out the cardboard pieces and I helped to sticky tape the boats together.  They LOVED their boats, and played with them constantly for the afternoon.

Next we headed downstairs to the 'Kalidescope' themed kids activity room. It was so great, I didn't even have time to snap any pictures. The girls made a cardboard coloured mosaic, which was placed on a spinning machine and spun to show how colours melded together.  Next we coloured in some white linen material using colours and various stencils to make headbands.

The gallery kept the girls busy for about 3 or 4 hours. They loved the hands on activities and I'm not ashamed to say I did too. I have my own headband from our little trip, and I made a cardboard tree!

We went on a Friday and during the school term, which turned out to be a great time to visit. There was hardly anyone at the museum and we had the kids areas at the Gallery of Modern Art all to ourselves.

I definitely recommend the GoMA as a rainy day activity, particularly during the week. I can imagine it would get very busy on the weekend.