I decided to surprise Dexter with a little trip to the Natural History Museum just me and him as we were invited along to see the preview of Wider Earth, so obviously we needed to make it a full day out.

So as part of our day I thought we should take advantage of not having a tiny person with us and we booked the spirit tour. Dex was so excited to get behind the scenes of his favourite place, and it really didn't dissapoint. 

We met up with the guide who started the tour by giving us a bit of history about the design of the museum before taking us behind the scenes and down under the museum. 

Straight away we got to see some of the spaces used by the museum scientists when working on museum specimens and excitedly got to see how the bones are cleaned for skeletal specimens, its something we've talked about a lot so Dex found it really interesting to see how they do it. 

Then we got to see part od the specimen storage with rows and rows of jars of specimens, many from years ago, Dex loved lookin through them all and finding out what they all were, he particularly loved the jars of eyeballs. After exploring the shelves we moved into the home of Archie the giant squid a room filled with massive jars mainly of various fish and sea creatures. It was fascinating to see Archie up close, and we learnt that their brains are shaped like a donut as their stomach is actually above their brain, so the hole lets food pass through.

Before the end of the tour we saw the Charles Darwin cabinet full of specimens collected by Darwin himself. Dex has been learning about Charles Darwin recently so this really made it feel real to him and gave him a proper connection to this previously unreal person in his books. 

After the tour we stopped for lunch and went to visit Life in the Dark (see blog post here) and we finished off our day with a very special late night at the museum to see a preview of the new show 'The Wider Earth'.

The short exert was simply magical, the combination of actors and frankly beautiful puppets is amazing. As we watched, Dexter grabbed my hand and gasped as he whispered mummy this is beautiful as the puppeteers flew butterflies above the stage. The preview was simply perfect and left us wanting so much more (we've got our tickets booked for the full show for my birthday)

Then to make the experience even better we were able to meet the cast including the puppets and Dexter even tried his hand at puppeteering.

The night sped past and we left chatting about everything we had seen. We had the perfect day made extrra special by our night at the museum, and we can not wait to go back again.