Musical Instrument Museum (MIM)

We spent the morning at the bank doing boring but essential bank stuff and the kids were really well behaved considering how dull it must have been for them. Olivia busied herself with her Princess activity book whilst Dexter 'drove' his car around the walls of the office and the filing cabinets and eating anything he could find in my bag.

From there we headed into Brussels to visit the MIM which contains one of the world's largest collections of musical instruments housed in a stunning Art Nouveau building, and it's free on the first Wednesday of every month which is a bonus! We were each given some infrared headphones in order to listen to musical extracts of the instruments on display which was cool. When you see a picture of headphones on the floor, next to a musical instrument, you go and stand on the picture or close to it and as if by magic the music from the instrument is played on your headphone. It was great to see how much the kids enjoyed this.

We then went upstairs to a 'Cinedelices' concert which involved three musicians playing live music to cartoons made in China, Iran, France and Germany. I tried to explain to Olivia about the olden days and the importance of music in silent film to which she assured me that she'd heard about the olden days and knew we didn't used to have electricity. I left it at that but we did think it would be quite funny to have some musicians in our living room whilst we were watching TV. The kids were great throughout the concert and at the end they got to have a go at bashing the drums themselves.

We received some good news today but need to have a few things confirmed before I can share it officially, so this is for my records for when I look back in time to come.