The KIDSEN BlogNews, Views and Advice from the UK's First Scandinavian Children's Store

People have been telling us for ages that we must take the kids to the Diana Memorial Playground in Hyde Park because it’s such a fun day out.  Two things finally swung it for us:

1) It’s Free

2) The Centrepiece of the Playground is a real pirate ship, not dis-similar to the Hoppetossa which the girls love from all their Pippi Longstocking stories.

Sure enough, we had a great time and the kids loved it too!  Highly, highly recommended.

Click Here For details of the Diana Memorial Playground

You can buy the Hoppetossa Pirate Ship Toy at Kidsen.  Click Here for Details

One of our friends has just put us on to an idea for a cheap holiday – a home swap!  Now, we know home swapping has been around for donkeys years, and we love our house, so it’s not normally something we’d consider, but when we saw this website everything changed!

This is all about luxury home swapping.  You either have a nice place, or a place in a nice location and it’s designed for people who care about their homes, so you’re pretty much going to get a decent “home from home”

You can zero in on a specific location that you want to visit and see all the properties available.  Like the 5 Bedroom Architect Designed Home near Stockholm (Above) with stunning views of the archipelago (below).

It’s too tempting and as much as London can be bitter sweet, we know there’s always going to be people wanting to come here, so we’re thinking seriously of handing over our keys!!

For details visit Luxe Home Swap:
http://www.luxehomeswap.com/

Had some friends over for dinner the other night and they arrived as we were putting our two children to bed.  I was reading a Swedish Children’s Book called Totte och Malin to my two and a half year old.  One part of the book explains in really simple terms the difference between (ahem!) little boys and little girls.

Being brought up in Sweden, where this sort of thing is very common, I thought nothing of this, but afterwards one of my English friends (who will remain nameless) was really shocked that we would show this to a young child…

We put it down to cultural differences, but then I decided to write a quick blog post and canvas public opinion. 
So, what do you think – did Claire over-react?  Oops sorry Claire!

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If you live in London and haven’t attended the annual Queens Park Day Festival, it’s certainly worth adding to your Filofax for next year.  There’s a great range of family activities and it’s always a brilliant day out.

We were honoured to be offered a stall at this year’s celebrations, so we packed up our brightest children’s toys, prams and baby clothes and headed on down to set up our first ever KIDSEN Stall.

Luckily, we were able to persuade our friends at Scandinavian Kitchen to join us on our stall.  Their mouth watering traditional Scandinavian cakes ensured we had a steady stream of customers all day.

It was great to see all of you down there and to meet new faces – even if some of you only stopped by for the Cinamon Buns!!!”

Bronte from Scandinavian Kitchen and her now legendary Cinamon Buns!

Our Snapshot of Queens Park Day

We stepped away from the Kidsen stall to snap a few things that we really enjoyed.   The pictures are below.  Thanks to all involved for a great day out!

"Detective Lester Freamon" from The Wire aka Clarke Peters shows his fun side for the KIDSEN camera at Queens Park Day...

The Human Mural Was a Fantastic Idea and People Really Got Involved!

We were assured nobody was hurt during the making of the mural... looks painful though!

The Selection of Food Was Excellent - No Herring or Crayfish Though...

The Tribal Face Painting Was A Big Hit!

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 once I caught a fish alive... sing along with me!!

So we decided to take a bit of time off from our busy schedule to celebrate Midsummer.  For the unitiated, midsummer celebrations involve gathering with friends, eating a traditional meal (delicious Herring, Schnapps, Boiled Potatoes, Schnapps, Crayfish and Schnapps).  Did I mention that we also have a few Schnapps.

We gave the London Locals the Low Down on why we Swedes celebrate Midsummer but after all those Schnapps I doubt they’ll remember…..  Luckily there’s a handy guide right here.