Pretend City

Since Collin's cousin Chris, his wife Beth and their son Oliver were out from Michigan, Tyler and I decided to meet them for a day of fun. We headed down to Irvine to Pretend City. While Tyler had been there before with Grandma and Grandpa, I had never been there. It was quite a drive, but totally worth it! Pretend City is exactly what it seems it is...a giant play area with everything you'd find in a city only child sized! You walk in and the pathways are roads with crosswalks and stop signs and stop lights. There are cozy coupes everywhere for children to drive on the roads. The first stop was the art station. They have two daily art activities - a messy one and a cleaner one.

He chose the clean activity - coloring!

Continuing along the road you find the post office, then the grocery store. You could shop for food in the grocery store and use money from the ATM to pay for your food. Tyler had to of course buy potatoes, onions and peppers since that's his favorite thing to buy at the grocery store.

You could then go to the farm and actually pick the produce. Once you harvested your fruits and vegetables you could go into the grocery store and sell your produce to the store. It was awesome.

The apples were actually "in" the tree - there were these little cubby holes in the tree for the produce so the children could actually pick the fruit! It was so cool.

Planting veggies

 

 

Bucket of oranges

There was a construction site where you could use blocks and pipes to build all sorts of mini structures.

 

They had a fire station complete with costumes and a mini fire truck. At each job you could punch your time card and then put the time card in the ATM's throughout the city to buy different things.

 

 

 

In the restaurant you could be the cook, the waiter or the guest. Tyler loved serving me. They had employees in just about every part of the city to help encourage the "pretending" which was just awesome!

 

 

There was a home with a bedroom, living room, bathroom and kitchen. Trying to drag Tyler from the kitchen was very difficult as you know his love for all things cooking.

There was a hospital (we didn't really visit there), a beach and the docks where you could fish.

It was an awesome city and one that I could see us visiting for many years in the future as Tyler learns to pretend. They had story time, a stage for performances and many other little things I'm sure we didn't even notice.

Oliver and Tyler enjoyed playing together. We stayed an extra two hours after they left giving Tyler four plus hours of playtime. To say he was exhausted was an understatement. If only it was a little closer so we could go for shorter periods of time...

Can't wait to take Daddy one day as I know he'd love playing with Tyler too!