Media Macaroni

I first saw the game Animal Mastermind Towers at the Pressman Toy booth at BlogHer, and the fine people at Pressman were kind enough to send me the game to try out with Olive. Each player gets a tower and arranges six tiles in a secret order in the tower. The other player has cards that match the tiles hidden in the tower. The object, like the classic game of Mastermind, is to guess the correct order of your opponent’s tower.

You can ask questions that include the words “above” or “below”, as in “Is your giraffe above your monkey?” Then, you can use the cards to keep track of the order as you decode it.

Olive has played this game countless times in the past few days. The game is designed for ages 6 and up, but after playing several rounds of the games in teams with the grandparents, Olive caught on to the strategy pretty quickly and can now play on her own. I find that the best games are ones where the rules are easily customizable, and that is certainly the case here. The instructions specify to play with fewer tiles with younger kids, but there are other ways to make the game easier, too, such as allowing the players to ask about bottom and top tiles.

There are upcoming licensed versions of the game, including (naturally) SpongeBob and Disney, but I like this set of animals. My favorite tiles are the sheep and alligator who look inexplicably angry. I always pick those two tiles first.

Nestled in Burling Slip, a little sliver of land in South Street Seaport, is a new playground that looks like a ship that’s just pulled into port, full of sand, water, blocks, and lots and lots of kids. This is Imagination Playground, a collaboration between the NY Parks Department, Rockwell Group architects, and Kaboom.

Last week, Olive and I went to a lovely event hosted by Beth Feldman of Role Mommy and Kimberly Coleman of Mom in the City at the South Street Seaport Museum. Imagination Playground is conveniently located right out the back door of the museum. The playground is heavily influence by the landmarked neighborhood, with masts poking up, and a great area that looks like you’re below deck on a pirate ship, complete with rope ladders and sacks that hold the precious cargo of spinning children.

Olive was in heaven with all of the water and sand and objects to manipulate water and sand with.

It’s funny. We’re really not beach people. We go to the beach maybe 2-3 times a year, which is not often enough for Olive to learn that moats are futile. The sand will continually soak up bucket after bucket of water dumped around the sand castle. Here, with the constantly running water and shallow sand, a moat!

The signature of Imagination Playground are these blue blocks that you can use in a variety of different ways. They have even created Imagination Playground in a Box. Step 1: Cut a hole in the box. Wait… That’s something else. This playground in a box is a set of the blue blocks that can be brought into any playground, with a coordinating curriculum to accompany them.

Imagination Playground bills itself as “a breakthrough playspace concept designed to encourage child-directed, unstructured free play.” Funny, I thought the point of all playgrounds is to encourage child-directed, unstructured free play. I think what they’re really trying to say is that this playground is more awesome than your playground. And they’re right. It’s definitely worth checking out on one of the remaining hot days of summer to enjoy all of the water. (Bring sunscreen, and lots of it!)

After the playground, the folks from the South Street Seaport Museum treated us to a tour of the Peking, one of those giant ships down in the water at the Seaport. It is one of the largest sailing vessels ever built and was great fun to wander around in. The kids even got to help raise and lower the giant sail, and there’s a room on board full of little live creatures from the sea.

As they were talking about their family programs, I was struck with how, despite the fact that we do a lot of different things around the city, we’ve just barely scratched the surface of things to do here. We really need more hours in the day, especially if it’s a weekend day.

Look! A long piece of string. Let’s follow it!

I recently received a copy of William Wondriska’s A Long Piece of String, a lovely dichromatic wordless picture book from Chronicle Books. This book was originally published in 1963 and it shows – the black string winds through gorgeous, simple orange illustrations typical of the graphic design of that time.

As I flipped through the book, I delighted at the randomness of the images that the string wound itself around… a castle, a gas pump, an octopus, a rake, a volcano. In my favorite spread, the string winds itself around three nuts: two of the nuts-and-bolts variety and one walnut. As I got to the end, I saw the page that summarized the book:

Alligator Bird Castle Dog Elephant…

… and realized DUH! It’s an alphabet book! Apparently, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. As you can imagine, the next reading of the book was even better. It was great reading it with Olive, having her name what the alphabetic images are.

I loved it when I thought it was a random collection of images, but I love it more as an alphabet book. This is a great addition for your wordless library.

Sorry for the post hiatus, but the fam and I have been up in Maine. In addition to filling our bellies with lobster and wading through the beautiful ocean looking for hermit crabs, we discovered something wonderful: the International Cryptozoology Museum.

As “The World’s Only Fully Public Cryptozoology Museum” it’s really not to be missed, and the experience is a rare one. Tucked behind an unassuming bookstore, you enter the museum through a narrow hallway filled with abominable snowmen and Feegee mermaids. It is there where you’ll meet Loren Coleman, the curator and owner, who will gladly start filling your mind with the wonders of cryptozoology the moment you and everyone in your party hands him five dollars.

Cryptozoology, you see, is the search for creatures that mainstream zoology would have you believe don’t exist… your mermaids, your horned jackrabbits, your sasquatches. Loren Coleman can spot a skeptic (like the Mac Daddy) a mile away, but he implores you to keep an open mind. Animals we now know are real, like okapi and pandas, were once the stuff of legend. So if they turned out to be real, why not mermaids?

Coleman talked at great length about the Patterson-Gimlin film, which captured a bigfoot-like creature in the wild. Apparently, with your open mind, you can see that this figure is actually a lactating female, and that her muscle movement cannot be replicated by man in a monkey suit. We’ve had such wonderful conversations with Olive about Bigfoot since our museum visit. She’s a believer.

Not a believer? Doesn’t matter. It’s hilarious and fascinating to hear Loren Coleman talking about this stuff, and about himself and his cryptozoologist bookwriting and television appearances, in wonderful detail. One day you might be surprised to discover something you thought couldn’t possibly exist, does. A black president, perhaps.

Who’s got two thumbs and loves a great compilation CD? This guy! Seriously, I’d take a compilation or soundtrack over a straight-up, one-artist album any day of the week. So say someone sends me a compilation CD, loaded with the all-stars of kids’ rock (They Might Be Giants! Recess Monkey! Dan Zanes! Secret Agent 23 Skidoo! Gustafer Yellowgold!). Then mix in a bunch of other really great songs from people you you haven’t heard of, and some that you have (Pete Seeger!). Then say that the proceeds will benefit the Haitian People’s Support Project. LOVE.

With friends in Haiti, not to mention a love of the music from that region, Musician Dean Jones from the band Dogs on Fleas wanted to do something to help relief efforts, and the album Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti was born. I like the label of “family music” to describe this album. There’s awesome stuff for kids, and a huge range of music that adults will enjoy, too. (It’s also a perfect album to bounce a baby to.) The album covers vast expanses of the cultural and musical world, and it thematically tackles the natural world, with songs about insects, plants, storms, and the skies. Dan Zanes’ track, “Tonight Tonight” is absolutely lovely, and Olive naturally gravitated to Recess Monkey’s “Fiddlehead Fern”. Many of the tracks on the album are previously unreleased, and some were recorded specifically for this album.

One of the best surprises on the album comes from geek icon Jonathan Coulton. With a name like “The Princess Who Saved Herself”, I’m pretty much guaranteed to like this song. The princess in question is a fabulous role model, and in a wonderful interlude in the song, she repeatedly hangs up on a prince. Hilarious.

As luck would have it, I listened to this album the day before its release, which is tomorrow. If you head over to Amazon, you can have a listen to all of the tracks. There’s not a clunker in the bunch. I think this one will be great in heavy rotation in a road trip we have coming up. Check this one out – great music for a great cause.

Today marks the start of BlogHer, a conference for lady bloggers (and the occasional blogging fellow) that brings to mind the marvelous celebrity blogger sketch on Saturday Night Live. The conference is in NYC, which means I get to play tourist in my town. Tonight the lovely NYCityMama hosted a party at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. I’ve always been curious to go there, and I’ll admit to slowing down to ogle the wax Samuel L. Jackson usually parked out front whenever I’m on 42nd Street.

It is a very, very strange place. You can get up close and personal with the wax figures (JLo’s cleavage was showing some wear…) and in a crowded room the figures are quite eerie indeed. Despite a couple of new figures like Kim Kardashian and Robert Pattinson, the whole place has a vibe of a different era, not unlike going to the freak show at Coney Island.

You can give your kids a very strange look at history by walking through the exhibits. Ghandi! Nixon! Michael Jordan! The Spice Girls!

It’s also fun to judge your own height against these famous people. I’m short, but I towered over Prince.

I had a great moment in the museum when my husband texted me a picture of Ozzie, at the exact moment I was able to text him a picture of Ozzy.

I’d like to recommend that everyone check out Madame Tussaud’s just for the weirdness factor, but I can only recommend going if you can find a way to go for free. Or maybe for five bucks or something like that. The normal admission price is a hilarious $35 for adults and $28 for kids. Even tourists shouldn’t be paying that.

In the giant sea of toys at Toy Fair earlier this year, this little box of dice caught my eye. It’s Rory’s Story Cubes, and the lovely people at Gamewright were kind enough to send me a set to try out with Olive.

There are a bunch of different ways that you can play with Rory’s Story Cubes, but the basic premise is that you look at the images on the dice that you’ve rolled, and weave all of those images into a story. There are some great images in the set to get your creative juices flowing. I rolled the dice and began,”One day I took a plane to Scotland. While I was there I visited a big, beautiful castle that had a flock of sheep grazing out front…” Olive saw what I was doing, seeing the plane, castle, and sheep on the dice, and she just ran with it – that was all the instruction she needed.

As adults, I think we try to hard to have our stories make sense. Sometimes you need to just stop and listen to the oddities that can unfold from your child’s mind. Olive rolled a set of images that included Earth, an alien, and a clock, and suddenly the clock became the planet Clockidon which traveled too close to Earth, stopping all time as we know it. Awesome.

This is a great take-along game to kill time anywhere where kids have to sit still. For us that’s in restaurants and on the subway. I’m very appreciative that the box is small and durable, and there’s room to roll the dice right into the box for playing on the go. Rory’s Story Cubes has earned a permanent place in my purse.

We spend a lot of time at the American Museum of Natural History. It’s one of our favorites, so it was with great excitement that I heard about their new ANMH Explorer app for iPhone and iPod Touch. Yesterday I got to try it out in the museum.

On a basic level, this app provides an interactive map, showing where you are in the museum in relation to what you want to see. I was very skeptical of this personal GPS feature. My phone often pinpoints my home in the middle of the Hudson river, so how could it tell me exactly where I am in the museum? Hundreds of wireless access points throughout the museum, that’s how. These access points triangulate your position, and I have to say, did a pretty impressive job of tracking my location.

I started by following a preset tour of the dinosaur exhibit. This shows you how to get to some key highlights in the exhibit, and tells you more information about the fossils than what’s on display in the museum. I found while doing this, though, that I was more focused on getting to the fossils in the tour than stopping to browse the exhibits, which made me feel oddly rushed. This could be great for tourists who want to visit the museum highlights, though. There are tours of different lengths for the most famous of the museum’s holdings, tours for individual exhibits, and even tours featuring the highlights from Night at the Museum. These tours remind me of being on a tour at the Louvre, racing around to see the most famous works in about 45 minutes. You can also create your own tour using the master list of highlights.

The Fossil Treasure Hunt had the opposite effect. This is by far my favorite part of the app, and I can’t wait to do it with Olive. You’re given a close-up view of one of the fossils, and you have to find that fossil within the sprawling dinosaur exhibit on the 4th Floor. You can use the map to help you get to the right place if you want, or you can really challenge yourself and try to find it without the map. Once you find the fossil, the app will ask you a question that you can answer after reading the display information about that fossil. No softballs here – these questions are hard! After you’ve answered the question correctly, the fossil is marked as found and then you’re off to the next one. I’m told that more Treasure Hunts are in the works, though no details on when they’ll be available.

The AMNH Explorer app is very thoughtfully put together. The interface is pretty clear, and anything you’re trying to do can begin from your current location. You don’t have to go to any particular starting point. The app will even direct you to the bathrooms, food, and exits. The very last thing I did was have it show me the quickest route to the subway exit. These features are invaluable when you have exhausted kids in tow, or ones who really need to pee!

Props to Bloomberg for footing the bill for this excellent use of technology. They even have a ton of iPod Touches to loan to visitors, though it requires a $250 hold on your credit card. Otherwise, the app is free and the museum experience is awesome. Other museums, please take note. (I’m looking at you, MOMA!)

You may have noticed that I’ve been slowing down with the posts lately. That’s because the boy doesn’t like to nap. Correction: The boy doesn’t like to nap unless he’s being held lovingly by a parent person. Mama needs hands free for bloggin’, kid.

What to do when I need a break? I’m not ready to park him in front of baby TV (OK, except for the occasional Koi Pond on the iPad). But what else can entertain a baby for twenty minutes at a time? Say hello to Lamaze® Octotunes. This little octopus has been through three kids in my family – my niece, Olive, and now Ozzie – and the effect on babies is uncanny. It’s like a pre-Elmo Elmo. The kids just instinctively know they like it.

If I plunk Ozzie down next to his octopus, he’ll just stare and smile and grab and babble for a longer stretch of time than he does anything else that doesn’t require two grown-up arms.

Sure, you can squeeze the legs and make some music, but that’s not really how it gets played with around here, unless Olive comes by to make some noise for Ozzie. All it really needs to do is sit there. For this, I’m grateful.

Bonus? It smells like vanilla. Even after about 9 years.

Wait… should I be worried about that?

When Mitali Perkins spoke at the Children’s Author Breakfast at BookExpo, she talked about how books can be both windows and mirrors: windows in the sense that they let you look in on other people’s lives and cultures, and mirrors in the sense that you can see yourself reflected in the characters. This is a wonderful approach to writing, especially when writing for young readers.

Mitali’s latest book is Bamboo People, a simultaneously tragic and uplifting tale set in modern-day Burma. Half the book is told from the perspective of Chiko, a scholarly Burmese boy that gets forced into military service. The other half is told from the persective of Tu Reh, a Karenni refugee living with his family on the Thai border. Chiko’s experience is shaped by the fact that his father, a doctor, is imprisoned for resisting the government. Tu Reh’s experience is colored by his thirst for vengeance after Burmese soldiers burned his home. The story of Bamboo People is how these two boys came to meet, and what happens once they do.

Sounds heavy, right? And yet I couldn’t put this book down. Not only did I learn a lot about a part of the world that I’ll admit I never give any thought to, but I found the characters to be so fully painted I couldn’t help but project myself into their world – a great window into Burma. Mitali Perkins’ writing is totally accessible, and kids will find themselves learning not just about the world, but about the human spirit and the choices that we have the power to make. They may even see a bit of themselves mirrored in these characters half a world away.

For further reading on Bamboo People, head over to Kidsmomo to see my friend Karen’s take on the book, having a personal tie to Burma. There’s more on Burma on the Bamboo People website, and it’s always great to visit Mitali’s Fire Escape, where Mitali Perkins writes about her experiences writing books between cultures.