The Lollibop 2013 Queen Elizabeth Park

We are a Lollibop loving family who have made it our mission to attend the festival for little people ever year. With its new location (Queen Elizabeth Park) in Stratford, we couldn’t wait for this year’s event.

So… What did we think?

This year attending the event was myself and my sister, her 3-year-old toddler Amy and my daughter Alice and toddler Harley. We opted to visit this year’s event on the Saturday (day two of this three-day festival). With the new location being in Stratford this was meant to make it a whole lot simpler to get to! That was true except London Transport had decided that Saturday would be the perfect day for some engineering works on the DLR completely throwing our travel arrangements into chaos. This meant that instead of the one DLR train into Stratford we found ourselves having to take two trains, making our journey a little longer than first planned.

Once we arrived in Stratford we found there were plenty of staff designated along the main route to the festival to guide festival-goers in the right direction. We arrived in the afternoon and given there had been a little rain that day the festival wasn’t as packed as I’d first expected which was fine by us as we got to do some of the things we had previously missed out on last years such as face painting and various other activities.

We saw Katie from cbeebies ‘I Can Cook’ and also Sid and Andy entertaining little festival goers in a big top style tent. The characters dotted around the festival were awesome, there was always someone to surprise us and make the kids laugh. This lovely bird was one of our favourites from the day…

The kids also had meet and greets with the Mr Men (much to the toddlers delight)! We had great fun getting creative. The kids used stamps to decorate Bandannas and we all enjoyed making sheep out of clay.

I think the biggest highlight of the day was watching the little ones get their groove on as they danced half the afternoon away. My three year old niece also bagged herself a prize in one of the dance offs and Harley was still dancing on the way home.

On site this year there was plenty of toilets avoiding long queues and little accidents. A buggy parking lot was provided which was undercover just incase of unexpected rain (which we experienced a little off throughout the afternoon) what’s more the buggy park was attended meaning we didn’t have to worry about our buggy going walk about.

The staff on the day were most helpful and we enjoyed a good proportion of our time down by the Heart FM tent were the kids had their face painted, danced to the music and played with the giant outdoor games provided, while we were able to relax and take a breather on one of the many deck chairs dotted about outside the tent.

We brought our own picnic along this year and found that there were plenty of picnic benches dotted around the festival site. Out stuff wasn’t to badly priced such as the balloons (£3 for small and £5 for large) we opted to buy ours before we left as we saw many balloons flying off into the sky throughout the afternoon. Lucky for the toddlers ours made it home in one piece. Our only complaint was the prices in which the ice cream vans were charging… £2 for an ice lolly and £3 for an ice cream! When there are 5 of you that really isn’t an option!

As we had expected the festival was a total hit with the children. Will we return for more Lollibop fun next year? Without a doubt we will… We can’t wait!

To find out more about the Lollibop festival and all its upcoming events check out there website, Facebook and Twitter Pages.