Why don't you have a look at bamboo boards? I don't know much about them but a friend recently chose them for her renovation. They are very hard, so would be great for kids dropping things all the time. They just look like any other floating boards.
just stumbled across this thread and thought i'd subscribe. i LOVE wooden floors...

We looked into getting bamboo when we first did our reno's and our house is small - 165m2 worth of bamboo floor boards was going to cost us around the $5,000 mark - not including instalation. We ended up tiling (ourselves - never again! - for $1,100