We had a fabulous day out with the kids at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam today!
The museum has free entrance for kids under 18 years old, and free for us parents with museumkaart. The travel was free with NS kidsvrij and NS weekendvrij for parents. Taking into account today was the hottest day ever in NL, I think spending it in an airconditioned grand building surrounded with majestic artworks was a real win!
We did Missie Meesterwerk/ Mission Masterpiece family exhibition and Pim & Pom in het Rijksmuseum that we couldn't stop fawning about and we couldn't recommend them highly enough!
Mission Masterpiece is both in Dutch and English and it got us, the whole family, suited up with labcoats, lanyards with mission checklist, and pencils. My kids immediately copied our instructor who slipped his pencil behind his ear!
My daughter immediately remarked, "We're all doctors now!", adoring us all in the white coats. Amen my dearest ones, hope you both can be Dr. or dr. too if you wish so, amiin.
(Notes: XS coatsize was still sweeping-floor length for my 4 year old though, and I saw another little girl with the same problem. Maybe Rijksmuseum could invest in several smaller size labcoats in the future?)
The people who were helping at the Mission Masterpiece were absolutely lovely! They enthusiasticly dressed all of us, and even offered to take a picture for all of us too! Yay for having a non-selfie group pic!
The instructions were very simple and there are literally step by step written guide for each of the missions (there are 8 of them). The age guide is correct for 8+ but it is indeed absolutely fun for the younger kids too. Just need lots of supervisions and guiding. My 7 year old wanted us to just quickly tell him what to do rather than reading the instructions, and my 4 year old prefers to do whatever she wants to do :D
The missions got them to use microscopes, observing UV light effects on gems, observing X Ray results, ink pigments, growth circle in woods, using magnifying glass to check kimono handcrafted decorations and much more! It was an hour crash course in science over artworks and absolutely worth it! In the end we could make other (silly) group pictures too that we could download. Yay!
Next, we picked up Pim and Pom from the ticket desk. They are two talking cat plushies who are on a mission in hunting a mouse and enlisting our kids help! Pim and Pom are just so cute and huggable and my kids wished so much we could just take them home! Me too honestly, and lots of people around too, since a lady even approached us to ask where she could buy them! I wish, gurl, I wish!
Make sure Pim and Pom both talks when you picked them from the counter! We had a hiccup that Pom wasn't talking, so we had too go back to the counter to get a new, fully charged Pom. But the people at the counter were just sweet and great and kept on supplying us with pims and poms throughout the day! We went through 2 Pims and 3 Poms in total!
Pim and Pom are only speaking Dutch and must ( / can?) be pre-reserved online for a 1 hour period for 7.5 eur. However, turned out it was fine for us to use it almost the whole day, yay!
Due to the first Pom not talking we had to stop our pim pom walkthrough before going to second floor and decided to have lunch first.
And, so, here's another amazing thing for family with kids at Rijksmuseum: a picknick room, indoor at Phillips Wing (just right before you go to the Mission Masterpiece) with clean tables, sink to refill your water and workshop for the kids!
We could just quickly feed our hungry, hungry kids with our packed lunch breads, get them cleaned right after and enjoy a bit of rest while they crafted some artworks after! Again, the staffs are sweet! The kids get great time crafting (colouring with crayons, watercolours, cutting and pasting) and the parents get a bit of rest on the sofas.
Then, on to the adventure with Pim and Pom! They took us visiting animals in the showpieces:
- Ceramic parrot
- Monkey who's eating an apple,
- Dog on a boat
- Angry golden cat
- Bees, owl, goat, and an elephant,
- A cat in the kitchen (of a dollhouse)
- A sleeping dog,
- 4 peaches (okay these are not animals)
- King lion on a ship
- Woofing dog
- Angry goose
- Finally, the mouse in a flower painting
The kids had to locate them, pet Pim and Pom, and follow their instructions along the way. To hiss as scarily as possible and to sing a lullaby for example.
And along the way, us, the parents, could enjoy some artworks without having to drag bored, unmoving kids from room to room and hopelessly trying to coax them to look at the showpieces! They had to inspect the pieces instead to find their target! The only downside is that they were hurrying us instead to move to the next target.
