Cape Town Science Centre.

A favourite place of many Capetonians was the MTN Science Centre which closed down a couple of years ago (we are enjoying it's replacement in the form of Toy Kingdom aka Playmobil heaven as well) however, we were glad to hear it had reopened, no longer under the sponsorship of MTN but rather multiple sponsors and closer to home in Observatory.

Click here for directions.

There are many very interesting activities, some old, some new, we were there before it had been completed and even so there was loads to do.

You can pay R5 to receive willingly induced nausea (if you're me that is, but if you're Niave it is pure joy!!)

"Pardon, what did you say?"!

There are many more activities than what I've photographed but the thing they loved best of all and had to be dragged away from was the Murray and Roberts building site:

Definitely on the list to return to and when they have a sponsor for their lift we can even take Grant along:-)

Butterfly World.

The last time we went to Butterfly World was when Niave was not yet 2, she slept through the entire outing in her pram, so, in search of a wheelchair friendly outing a couple of Sundays ago we decided we needed to return with all members of the family present and awake!

A beautiful place and fairly reasonable, we paid R125.00 for a family of 4 package and you can literally stay the whole day if you wanted to. There is more to see than just butterflies too - just check out all this wildlife:

(Boris!)

The marmosets are very friendly and 1 in particular loved Grant, I think it was all his "paraphernalia" not the least his wheelchair, monkey's really are very inquisitive, he was looking at and grabbing everything!

But, pass the keys to Abigail and the monkey follows!

He was very intrigued by the wheelchair!

There were also tortoises, ducks/birds and a room full of hairy spiders of many varieties, insects including enormous cockroaches, giant snails, centipedes (or perhaps they were millipedes!) and a few rare species of frogs.

But we were there to see the butterflies and we could have stayed longer, it's a very relaxing (if humid!) place.

We broke the rules and managed to get 1 or 2 butterflies to land on our hands!

I'm sure...we'll be back!

Hot, hot hot.

The last few weeks have been very hot here, no kidding, it's summer in Cape Town but when I say hot, I mean HOT!

Anyway, it gave us an excuse to take advantage of a well loved outing to the water slides at Muizenberg.

Abigail just loves it there and Niave finally got into it on the small slide so 2 happy girls they were.

(that is an expression of delight...just in case you were wondering!)

The rest of the holidays...

I haven't posted for a while because I hadn't downloaded photo's for ages but the thing about downloading photo's long after the event is that you get to relive it!! I'd forgotten about half the things we'd done and although they were only a couple of weeks ago, it seems like months!!

School started much earlier this year than usual so we didn't have much time after Christmas and New Year before starting to get back into school mode, but one of the things I'd really been wanting to do was visit the Castle in Cape Town.

It was an interesting outing but a little "old" for Niave, she did enjoy it but some of the exhibitions were a bit boring for her, she enjoyed the things like the canons and walking around on the roof "on top of the world"! Abs could appreciate it a bit more and found some rooms very interesting, they were both very intrigued by the "torture chamber" but we didn't hang around there too long, too many questions that require difficult answers!!!

Photography is not allowed inside the buildings and the most effective picture of the castle is actually taken from above and seeing as we weren't going to be in a helicopter, I bought a postcard to show the girls what the building we were in actually looked like, it's hard to imagine from the inside:

Some other pics of the day:

A worthwhile outing for children 6 years and over... and adults!

Goodbye Tessa.

My parents dog Tessa, who had to be put down yesterday, will be missed by the girls, especially Abigail.