A rather wet day out.

Today was the first Nottingham Children's Book Festival.  We'd booked to go to a few of the wide variety of workshops and there were also various drop-in activities going on throughout the day.  We got rather soggy on our way to the first workshop, which was activities based on an extract from Peter Pan.

Our Peter Pan nest boats.

After lunch we split up and A took the girls to How to Draw Goodies and Baddies, which they enjoyed, while I went to hear Christopher Lloyd (who incidentally was a HEing dad for the primary years) talk about one of his big Wallbooks.  A and the girls snuck in to the end of his very good talk and we went to find a cup of tea and a piece of cake before A went home and the girls and I went for the final workshop that we'd booked, which we hadn't realised was by the drama teacher who had run the Harry Potter workshop that they'd been to a few weeks back (I just looked back and my blog and can't quite believe I didn't mention it - they thought it was fantastic and have asked C, who organised it, if she can organise a follow up one).  It was only half an hour long, but they really enjoyed it and M in particular is really quite keen to start going to her classes.  It's not really an option at the moment, as the class she runs here clashes with Brownies and the only other option is when K has ballet but a drive away.  However, there are short courses during school holidays that are a possibility and K is due to move up in ballet soon, so we should be able to sort something fairly soon.  Finally, having checked we could squeeze in, even though we didn't have tickets, the girls and I went along to the third and final talk by Christopher Lloyd, where M & I both answer questions (M that the population of the world is approx 7 billion) and took part in the very interactive talk (she 'read his mind', demonstrating the massive influence of the technology of writing, I blew up a balloon).

Christopher Lloyd with his Science and Technology Wallbook.

We were impressed enough to buy the books and had a brief chat with him afterwards.  We then, having mostly dried off during the day, got exceedingly soggy walking home via the shops to buy some marshmallows to go in hot chocolate, which we had while watching Strictly Come Dancing.

In other news, I forgot to mention K announced, while we were playing Vapoosh!, that 1 plus 1 minus 1 times 1 divided by 1 equals 1, which cannot be denied!