Most of our friends and family know that we don’t do birthday parties. That doesn’t mean we don’t love attending YOUR parties, we just don’t have them ourselves. There are a lot of reasons for this so lets see if I can name them.

• They can be pricey
• It’s usually VERY stressful on the parents and quite often the kids
• I see a lot of parents just drop their kids off at parties and when your kids are ages 3 and 6, I have ni desire to babysit 20 of them
• I don’t want people to feel pressured to buy the kids gifts. If you want to get them a present, then that is awesome and very generous of you, but you should never be obligated
• Utter chaos
• If you have a party for one year, they will always expect them for every year

I’m sure I could list plenty more, but what it comes down to is personal preference and probably our lifestyle. If we are going to be spending money on a party, I would much rather take that money and DO something with it. Have some fun for a couple days, not just a couple of hours. Every year we have always done something special, whether it be go camping, spend the day or week at the beach, go to a hotel spa (and yes this was Ian’s suggestion, not ours), etc. Since the boys birthdays are just a month apart we took the time this year to try and experience more of Europe… so we went to LegoLand!

Legoland is located outside of London in the town of Windsor. We left bright and early one morning and drove to France. It took about an hour and 45 minutes to get to the French side of the chunnel. We drove our car onto a train which was an interesting experience and about 40 minutes later we were in England and driving on the wrong side of the road! That was pretty interesting. From there it was about another 90 minutes t0 the park. We got there 45 minutes before opening so it was really perfect timing. The park itself was really cool. So many things made out of legos, etc. What I liked about it versus other parks like disney world or 6 flags, etc., was that it is for little kids. You don’t have teenagers running around and you don’t have adults there who aren’t there with their young children. We bought two day passes to the park and spent two full days there. The kids had an awesome time and we had a lot of fun too!

One night we also went to the town of Windsor and toured the castle. It was impressive to say the least. The last day we went hiking around the White Cliffs of Dover. This was probably the highlight of the trip for me! Here are some pics of our adventure!

Ian and Harry Potter

Abe and Harry potter

One of the scenes created from legos

For most of the rides, they had a huge lego center so the kids could play while the parents waited in line. We were very grateful for this!

Abe really wanted to go on this swing and Ian amused us. They both had fun.

We finished our day in a few rooms that just had tons of legos to play and build with. Here is Ian

and here is Brummy

Below are some pics of the castle.

And Dover. It was just gorgeous there.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 3:36 am and is filed under Travel, Family life, Belgium. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.