Matthew’s 4th Birthday Weekend

It happened this weekend. My eldest turned FOUR.. four years of age. I can’t believe it. The shortest four years for sure. He is now entering the pre-school year and next year he is going to big school. He is so not ready. I know every parent will say that. He is still my little baby no matter what but I am sure he will do brilliantly in school. In the last few weeks he learnt how to colour in. Prior to that he scribbled all over the page but now he is sitting concentrating with the tongue out. It looks so funny but yet so cute.

For his fourth birthday we decided to do something different. He will have so many birthday parties when he is in school. His actual birthday was Sunday. I took a half day on Friday so we had plenty of time to drive down to Dublin. Hubby is staying in Dublin a lot every week due to work so we stayed in Citywest Hotel, the place he always stays in during the week. He wanted to show us around where daddy spends half his time. In a way that was cute.

We arrived around 4pm. Great timing considering we left at 1pm and with 2 children in toe. We only had to stop once and that was only for a very short time. Hubby booked us into an interconnecting room. Most bloggers/mums will agree that it’s simply better than one room, especially for two nights. There was a slight mess up by the hotel where they reserved the room for September rather than August but they did a great job fixing it. We basically had two bedrooms in the end where you can open the door. That’s even bigger and the kids enjoyed all the space.

It was just gone dinner time so we drove 10 mins down the road to an American restaurant, hubby dined in many times before. The menu was big and the food was amazing. I had a typical burger and the kids had chicken nuggets/sausages and chips. I can’t forget the dessert menu. Matthew and Chloe enjoyed some ice cream while  mummy had a sneaky Strawberry ice cream meringue Sunday. Of course I shared some with Matthew because he loves strawberries.

The next morning we enjoyed some continental breakfast in the hotel which contained of cereal, croissants and fruit for the kids and fry and toast for us parents. While we were so close to Naas (our future place we will move to in two months), we decided to do a few little jobs for our new house to get them out of the way before heading to Tayto Park which was a approx. 40 mins drive from Citywest.

The admission was 15 EUR each. Obviously it was free for Chloe because she is under three. I have always wanted to go to Tayto Park because I never heard anything bad about it. I was really impressed when we got there. They recently added a new Dinosaur World into the park.  I knew Matthew would love that but he kept reassuring me “It’s not real”.

You could easily spend the whole day there. Some stuff we didn’t get to do at all because we didn’t have the time unfortunately. As well as the park, they also have a zoo built in with animals ranging from tigers, eagles to otters. There was also a pet zoo. You could go in and pet the zoo. Of course we used that opportunity and went in. I didn’t think he would go in but he really enjoyed petting them. It was lovely to see because as a child I used to love going to the zoo in my hometown with my mum and you were also allowed to go in and pet/feed the goats.
They only allowed a small amount of people in at the time so it doesn’t get too crowded.

On the way we found a massive play area. When I say massive, I mean massive. I haven’t seen anything like it. You could easily get lost in there but they had supervisors going around too. Daddy brought Matthew over to the slides and let him climb certain things. He climbed up one thing really high and daddy ended up getting him. While the boys were having fun, Chloe and I were on the side watching them and also discovering a mini playground for the babies. Chloe enjoyed some slide time, too. I took a video of the playground which you can watch at the end of this blog post.

 

You can’t go to Tayto Park without taking a photo with Mr. Tayto. To anyone who doesn’t know who Mr. Tayto is…Tayto is basically a brand of crisps produced in Ireland. The main ones would be Cheese & Onion but they also do many different other flavours and shapes. They did have a crisp factory on side but we didn’t manage to see that. Maybe next time. We didn’t get to meet Mr. Tayto himself but at least we got a photo with the statue and the grass version of him.

Matthew loves trains he has been dieing to go on one. There was a mini train that was going around the premises for 5 mins or so. We couldn’t pass that of course. We had to queue for a little while but not too long. Matthew was really excited to go on it. He wanted to go on it again with daddy but the queue got really long then so we had to continue on because it was getting late. It was made in a kind of western style. I even enjoyed.

That evening we wanted to dine in the hotel restaurant but unfortunately it was all booked and they couldn’t accommodate us. Luckily it’s easy to commute around Dublin so we went to the Citywest Shopping Centre and had dinner in Eddie Rockets. I haven’t been there in ages. Kids enjoyed chicken nuggets and chips, hubby had sweet potato fries and I had BBQ Chicken wings. Delicious but always way too much. I am still a bit under the weather with my chest infection so can’t eat that much.

The next morning we went down for breakfast before checking out. Hubby arranged to call down and see his sister/ Matthew’s cousins. Without us knowing they baked him a cake within 90 minutes. He was so happy. There were candles, a car made out of icing, the whole lot. The cake was surely delicious. Chloe kept looking for more.

After lunch we decided to hit the road and head back home. As we were away all weekend I didn’t get to do the grocery shopping. Instead we went out for dinner in a local restaurant in Sligo called Coach Lane. The icing of the cake was, when the staff came out with an ice cream for Matthew with a candle on it singing happy birthday. He was absolutely delighted with himself and blew out the candle.

You could say that he might have had the best birthday ever.