There’s a universal hatred of recipe blogs where the author talks about their life for paragraphs and before you finally get access to the recipe…but I am going to do basically the same thing and talk about my life, because this blog is for me and my measly # of friend and family followers who can use this to keep in touch with all the fun things happening in our lives!

We had one of those weekends where 3 kids feels like a lot of kids. And everyone was healthy! I’m sure we will feel worse in the winter, when I’m back to work, and viruses start hitting our family, but one thing at a time. This weekend was our first weekend back from our long vacation, and was immediately jumpstarted by back-to-school social night (which I planned) on Friday night, then our first rec soccer practice (which M coached) on Saturday morning, where it was fun but chaotic trying to wrangle a screaming 2 YO who just wanted to hang with daddy (and it was so hot, I was worried about baby C sleeping in her Doona…). Then, we began potty training weekend for T. Everyone said boys take longer, but I personally thought he would’ve been ready for it months ago. We ended up delaying the weekend so that we wouldn’t have to deal with regressions during this Switzerland trip, but decided to rip off the bandaid this past weekend. He did great (he was definitely ready!), but it was still an intense 3 days of staying at home and being mentally “on” for every second. And then of course we got hit with a lice outbreak at school, which we ended up being clear of, but still meant S was stuck at home for 1/2 of the potty training weekend. The sibling bond is cute, but also chaotic…so many tiny fights and eruptions, especially at home for some reason (maybe it’s the sharing of toys? They are less overstimulating outside or at others’ houses). If you are reading this and thinking about having an only child, I support it and completely understand it 😉 (Again, we were always going to have 3-4 kids, but I COMPLETELY get just having one kid. Have more kids for yourself, not for your kids!)

Anyway, being at home for 3 straight days means our house looks like a tornado ripped through it, but the kids are all in bed (Baby C has a consistent 7 pm bedtime now too! Yay, but also kinda sad! How did she grow up so fast?) so we’re back to some semblance of peace. I cannot believe I only have a few more months until I’m back at work – still a ton of time left, but it felt like only yesterday when I had basically the whole year left! Must take advantage of all the P&Q while I can!

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Now we finally get to the post about Murren and Allmendhubel! Usually for trips I have an entire spreadsheet of where to go, what to eat etc…but as more and more kids enter the picture, I have less of a plan. The only two things on my list that I definitely wanted to do were the playgrounds at Allmendhubel and the Alpine Cow’s Playground. So once we visited Allmendhubel on our first full day, I felt like I could relax the rest of the trip 🙂

Murren was a quick cable car ride away from Lauterbrunnen town center. We spent some time wandering around town – as a car-free village, it was very stress-free bringing the kids along. The funicular to Allmendhubel is a 10 minute walk away from the cable car center, so we used that as an excuse to explore town.

I admit we didn’t do much research into what type of train pass would be the most budget-friendly, but the SBB app was extremely easy to use and we paid for all our funicular, cable car, and train tickets on there. Note that the way they check tickets is by random checks – I think we only got checked 3 times out of our countless public transport rides we took, but if you’re caught without a valid ticket you get fined on the spot. We took a funicular up to Allmendhubel, where the famous “Flower” playground sits right next to a nice al fresco restaurant by the funicular station. There is also a quick Flower trail leading to the top of the mountain above the playground.

Playgrounds in Murren – even the random playground in town was so much fun. Swiss playgrounds all include some element of “danger” by American standards – great for risk-taking in my opinion, but could be scary for others

The playground was so innovative, and completely not crowded at all. Both T and S played independently there for hours. There was a water play section, a water misting maze, a giant slide, dairy farm pretend play, an underground burrow tunnel, a zip line, and much more…every kid’s dream! We did this trip for the playgrounds in the Alps, and this did not disappoint. We brought some sandwiches from Coop and had a very nice picnic at the top of the mountain, while the kids ran around and played.

I loved this playground. In one of these pictures you can see S about to climb down to a “mole” mountain, which definitely was not big enough for an adult to fit in. There was a very long tunnel from this entrance to another part of the mountain…kids could definitely be stuck in there if you didn’t trust them enough. Do as the Swiss do and let them figure it out themselves.

The entire trip was worth it, just for this one playground. I wish I were still there! But our local playground seems pretty nice now compared to being stuck indoors staring for 3 straight days at T’s butt.