Review: The two farting sisters

Dad is vis­it­ing China. He leaves older sis­ter Stella in charge of the farm. This is a mis­take as she promptly sells it, then scarp­ers off to Par­is to spend the pro­ceeds, leav­ing little sis­ter Daisy the almost use­less black­berry patch. How­ever Daisy is very resource­ful and hard­work­ing. She is determ­ined to buy the farm […]

A bunch of reasons to get outdoors

Look at that weath­er. Just LOOK AT IT. Woah! We’re going to assume from all the cars parked in Thorndon that you’re already going to Garden Magic events in the dell as part of  Sum­mer City,but here are some oth­er things you might wanna con­sider: Pos­it­ively Pasi­fika: The win­ner of New Zea­l­and Idol is going, […]

Help Ivy save the dinosaurs!

It’s school hol­i­days again, and if you’re in charge of young people, chances are you’ve already heard that “I’m boooooooooooooooooooooooored”. We’d like to help you out with that (not just because it’s also in the best interests of the non-child-havers to keep kids occu­pied, hon­est)! So, we’re giv­ing away a fam­ily pass (four people) to […]

Sky Dancer in the Capital E National Arts Festival

We’re grownups at the Wel­ling­tonista, well, unless there’s a fart joke to be made, so when there’s a Nation­al Arts Fest­iv­al for Chil­dren, we thought it would be good to get some chil­dren involved, so here are three reviews of Sky Dan­cer. Henry, age 11:  “Sky Dan­cer was not like any­thing I have seen before. […]

Purple Cake Day is this Sunday, and there’s cake

We like cake. We like high tea.  We like kids get­ting edu­ca­tion. And we like the col­our purple, Whoopi Gold­berg not with­stand­ing. So we’re def­in­itely keen on Purple Cake Day this Sunday March 10. “Cel­eb­rate Purple Cake Day with High Tea at the Coron­a­tion Café. Come along to one of our four sit­tings for a […]

The kids are just fine at the Capital E National Arts Festival

While the urb­an­ites of the ‘ista are all cur­rently abuzz about the Fringe Fest­iv­al, those amongst us who are par­ents (yes, we exist) are more excited about the Cap­it­al E Nation­al Arts Fest­iv­al set to hap­pen from March 11–23. Dur­ing the weeks, the Fest­iv­al runs an edu­ca­tion pro­gramme, so expect to see bus loads of […]

Children on the waterfront – what to do on Anniversary Weekend

Hey, it’s Wel­ling­ton Anniversary Week­end this com­ing week­end! That’s pretty excit­ing. There’s a great story in the new­est issue of Fish­head all about the games and races they used to have in olden times to cel­eb­rate, but in cur­rent times, we have The Great Scav­enger Hunt. Cap­it­al E (still very much alive even though they […]

Let us tell your kids where to go these holidays

The ‘ista may occa­sion­ally come across as a bunch of child-hat­ing yup­pies, but the truth is about 50% of us have kids, and we need to keep them enter­tained these hol­i­days. So we’re gonna take them to Cap­it­al E. Why? Because we want to play the old school arcade games ourselves. From build­ing mech­an­ic­al mar­vels […]

No mere cat: the Meerkat encounter at Wellington Zoo

Wel­ling­ton Zoo is now offer­ing MEERKAT ENCOUNTERS. The cap­it­al let­ters are there to try to con­vey my excite­ment when I heard the news. I don’t think even cap­it­al let­ters can con­vey how excited I was when the zoo invited us along to meet the meerkats for ourselves. I’m mak­ing it my aim to touch all […]

Summer city

Fairy Trina and Fairy LilyFor some of the smal­lest Wel­ling­tonis­tas the most import­ant part of the coun­cil’s Sum­mer City fest­iv­al has fin­ished with the end of Fairy Trina’s wildly pop­u­lar run of Enchanted Tales on Sat­urday.

And this even­ing marked the end of a series of pretty inter­est­ing even­ing Gar­dens Magic events with a gig by OdESSA. But fear not – there’s still lots more excite­ment for every­one between now and the end of March when the fest­iv­al wraps up.

We’d recom­mend pick­ing up one of the guides from the lib­rary or oth­er spots around town; or fail­ing that, down­load a copy from the coun­cil’s event web­site.

Then, assemble your own pro­gramme of activ­it­ies. Hmmmm… maybe those same small Wel­ling­tonis­tas would like to see The Phoenix Found­a­tion on Valentine’s Day? Because their par­ents sure as hell would…