Today, Lester's Farm in Mount Pearl held it's annual Pumpkin Fest. Madeline liked the corn maze, looking at the huge piles of pumpkins and gourds, but seemed to be the most impressed by the pumpkin-flinging festivities over by the trebuchet.
Wahoo! Fall is here, and I've discovered more options for getting out of the house with a toddler in St. John's! Madeline and I can't make excuses for being hermits like we were in the spring when we first moved here :)
And in the new year, just before we leave St. John's, a Little Gym is supposed to be opening. Argh.
That was one of Madeline's first four-word sentences. She uttered those words while walking across a balance beam, her tiny hands cupped in mine. One of the things to do with a toddler in St. John's is take them to gymnastics class. There two gyms offering a parented class for one and two year-olds: Cygnus Gymnastics and Campia Gymnastics (okay, this one is really in Mount Pearl, but really, what's the diff?).
We took the toddler class at Cygnus over the summer - the last class was on Friday. Madeline and her classmates got to try out miniature versions of the highbar, the parallel bars, and the balance beam (though the toddlers were free to walk on the elevated beams, which Madeline totally preferred). There were trampolines for jumping, soft padded blocks and mats for tumbling and rolling, and a big pit of large, moist, damp, mildew-y foam blocks for jumping into. Oh, how I loathed that foam pit ... I think that most of the parents felt the same way, actually. One thing that I have to mention is that the facility is really dusty, probably because of all the chalk, and that it could be a dangerous environment for toddlers who run before they think. In parts of the gym, there are cables running from equipment to the ground every few inches, so the tripping hazard is great.
The cost was about $10/class, and the classes were an hour long. Madeline had a really good time, and it was neat to watch her courage increase and her balance improve from week-to-week. The class ended with "sticker time", so she was always happy when we exited the building.
Yesterday, Madeline, her Auntie Julie, and I crossed off another item on the toddler-friendly St. John's list - we went to Lester's Farm on Brookfield Road. I first heard of the place when Chris and I were looking for strawberry u-pick farms, but one of my friends mentioned that when she'd taken her little guy last fall, there were a small petting farm area with animals.
The petting farm area is a separate building that is accessed from a path outside the side door of the main building (where the farm's produce is for sale). There was a donkey, an emu, a cow, two sheep, two pigs, two mature goats, two turkeys, a handful of chickens, and a cage of ducklings. Auntie Julie had a lot of fun feeding the bunch. Madeline liked looking at the ducks and the sheep, but wasn't too impressed with the mature goats who tried to nibble her sunhat :) Outside the petting shelter, there was a cage with a few little cute little bunnies. Madeline's favourite part of the farm was the pen further into the field with the baby goats - they were about as tall as she was, and non-threatening enough that she wanted to stick a hand with the 25-cent goat food over the fence and feed them herself! Tricky, as she hasn't quite figured out that whatever is in her hand falls off if she tips it over! I think she had a lot of fun, and it's totally free-of-charge (unless a person wants to feed the animals - then bring quarters)!
Apparently, the weather this summer has been unusually warm here in St. John's. Madeline and I try to get outside on a daily basis, and even have been brave enough to walk the trail around Quidi Vidi Lake (it took a really long time, and I had to take both the Zooper and the Ergo with us). A playground should be built any day now on our street. I kind of hope that "any day" means before the snow comes again ...
Even though it's not the most suitable playground for Madeline, we've been going to Bannerman Park a lot recently. There is one playgroup that meets there on Wednesdays from 10 - 11:30 am. It's free, offered by the City of St. John's. They have an assortment of toys for non-mobile babies, a play tent, lots of balls, a wee picnic table for snacks and drawing, and a bunch of ride-on toys for toddlers.
A different playgroup meets at Bannerman Park from 10 - 11:30 on both Thursdays and Fridays. The folks who run it bring sand toys (even though it's a gravel surface), and bubbles, and serve juice and a snack.
Both groups welcome anyone who shows up with a child under 5. I may not have made any friends by going to these things, but getting out of the house sure beats turning on the tv.
Another item for the toddler's guide to St. John's category - the Newfoundland Science Centre. Madeline and I checked this place out earlier this month. I hadn't even realized that there was a science centre here until I saw a brochure for it at the tourist info centre! It's tucked away in a corner of the Murray Premises (entrance is through the science gift shop). A positive - children Madeline's age get in free (I think my admission was $6, but it might have been less). A negative - no parking is provided, so guests have to pay to park on the street or in the Murray Premises lot.
Madeline probably would have enjoyed her visit to the Centre a lot more if she was a couple of years older, but there still were some things that she really enjoyed. With the current dinosaur exhibit, she spent a few minutes making a crayon-rub of a dinosaur skeleton, and enjoyed playing in the sandbox with a brush to uncover a buried fossil. A more experienced paleontologist would probably have managed to get less sand on the floor, I'd expect. There is a puppet theatre station with sea-creature puppets that Madeline and I played with, a row of aquarium tanks with a gecko and assorted bugs to look at, and an area with blocks fashioned to look like stone bricks to build with. I would have liked to linger at the mental challenge stations, but the pint-sized boss had other ideas.
The staff didn't strike me as particularly knowledgable, but they were high school students who had probably only been at the job for a couple of days at the time. We stayed and played for over an hour, and our parking charges weren't much, so I'd say that the science centre was worth the price of my adult admission. It was an okay place for a toddler, though I think that a preschooler or a school-age child would get way more out of it, of course.
I know that this category is supposed to be filled with activities to do with toddlers in St. John's, but really, the Salmonier Nature Park is only about an hour outside of town (in Salmonier, natch). The three of us had a great time! The park is designed in a big loop (wood boardwalk surface, friendly to strollers and wheelchairs) that takes a person past enclosures for ailing or retired indigenous wildlife, with some very pretty Newfoundland foliage everywhere and in-between. It was the first place I've seen a bakeapple, outside of a jar of Auntie Crae's jam. The visitor's centre has a changing table for diaper-clad guests in the wheelchair accessible washroom as well.
I will also mention that we stopped at The Wilds golf resort for lunch before heading back to the city. I have to give our dining experience there a thumbs down because they actually had a children's menu (with the words "kids eat free at the Wilds" written in large type across the front) but did not offer one to us when we sat down, even though it was very obvious that we had a child dining with us (we discovered the existence of the menu after we'd placed our orders). So I ordered chicken fingers for my entree - something that she and I could share. Even when we asked to see the kids menu immediately after, we didn't receive one.
Well, it's not the Calgary Zoo, but St. John's does have the Fluvarium.
What's a fluvarium, you ask? As far as I can tell, it's a structure with windows that is built into the side of a stream for the purpose of observing the resident ecosystem. There's probably more to it, but Madeline didn't exactly let me pause for long at the exhibit explaining where the term "fluvarium" came from!
Anyway, it cost Chris and I $5.50 each to visit the Fluvarium with Madeline (children too young for school are free), but neither of us are sure that it was worth the expense at Madeline's current age. She honestly seemed to have more fun climbing the spiraling staircase and running from the display case with the stuffed duck to the display case with the stuffed beaver than she did learning about watersheds and trout. Even watching the trout in the viewing windows didn't mesmorize her for longer than seven minutes (though she did sign "fish" and empathically exclaim "Nemo!" a few times). I think that Chris and I were hoping that we'd get more out of the visit. Maybe if we returned again in two or three years, our visit would last a little longer :) I think that older kids would think that the Fluvarium is rather cool!
Sidenote: another venue for getting up-close-and-personal with wild things in the St. John's area is the Ocean Science Centre. They have a touch tank and a seal cam. We haven't been there yet, but it's on the list.
Today the weather in St. John's was characteristically overcast and cool. Not officially rainy, but close enough to warrant a rainy day type of activity: Madeline and I finally visited the A.C. Hunter Children's Library. It's quite small, but it has a seating area with a child-sized table, a sofa, an armchair and a rocker, a Madeline-approved bead-maze, and a tank of really cool fish. The board books are organized in a chest nearby, easily accessible to wee little kids. I was hoping to find some sort of pamphlet listing story times and such, but didn't see anything of the sort, although a message board outside of the library doors had notices for activities for school-age kids and a schedule for La Leche League meetings. We came home with a pair of temporary-resident library cards (no fee) and five picture books to read ...
When I lived on West Broadway in Vancouver, one of my favourite ways to spend a Saturday involved browsing through Kidsbooks. The only thing I ever bought there was my least favourite Harry Potter; I was really there to peek at the picture books and admire the illustrations. St. John's is fortunate enough to a dedicated children's bookstore as well, Granny Bates (located on Bates Hill). Madeline and I spent more than a half-hour there the other day - she sat in the little child-sized chair and flipped through a few volumes of Clifford for awhile and then settled on the steps by the cash desk to look through books with the terrifically nice (and patient) lady who manages the shop, while I browsed the shelves. We left with two more books than I intended, but it was hard to resist getting Madeline the board book version of Alligator Pie. I remember my dad reading that one to me when I was little!
