Media Macaroni

The girl and I have been sharing a perfect day. The sun has (mostly) been shining and we headed downtown to check out the newly opened High Line. This elevated park currently stretches from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street, but ultimately it will go all the way to 34th Street. 

You’d never know the wonders of the High Line when viewed from below.

But then climb up the steps and it’s a scenic and flowery wonderland. 

The west side of downtown Manhattan in the 1930s was a bustling industrial district. However, train traffic at street level made it deadly, and elevated tracks were built to keep things safe on the street. For the past 30 years, no trains have been running and the tracks sat empty. For the past 10 years a grouped called Friend of the High Line rallied to have it opened as public space. And now it’s open, and awesome.

The lovely design for the High Line is by James Corner Field Operations, with Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Benches pop out of the ground at irregular intervals, and some reclined seating is perched on wheels directly on the tracks, a nice touch. Olive pretended to be a circus performer and she climbed and jumped off the benches. 

It’s lovely to walk along and catch surprising vantage points of the city, including all of the amazing new condos and hotels in Chelsea and the Empire State Building. 

One part of the High Line perfectly frames the far-off Statue of Liberty. 

The planting is gorgeous, with unusual combinations of plants and flowers that seemed to be making the bees really happy. 

And there are clean bathrooms. Need I say more? 

After the High Line, Olive and I headed over to the oft-recommended Chelsea Waterside Park on 23rd Street, where we’d never been. It’s one of those new-fangled climbing playgrounds, perfect for a girl who’d spent the past hour pretending to be a circus performer. 

There are some terrific water features, too. Not all of them are as… um… suggestive as the ones seen here. 

Our little date ended at an outside table at Empire Diner on 10th Ave. Like I said, a perfect day for me and my girl. 

One of the great things about spending time off with my 7-year-old niece is having the opportunity to catch up on all of the recent episodes of Phineas and Ferb. I mean really, what better way is there to spend summer vacation than watching a show about summer vacation? How about playing a game about summer vacation? I dusted off my languishing Gamefly subscription and fired up the Nintendo DS for some Phineas and Ferb summertime fun.

As usual, Phineas and Ferb have big plans, and this time they involve building roller coasters that stretch through the whole town. In each level, Phineas and Ferb gather parts for a ride, as well as general machine parts for fixing things along the way. The two travel as a pair. Phineas can talk to other characters and rummage for parts. Ferb can fix things. Together they can navigate high jumps, ladders, ski lifts, tightropes, and the like. The back and forth of the two characters reminded me quite a bit of Lego Batman. Sometimes it was a little too much switching back and forth between the stylus and keypad for my liking, but overall the exchange was interesting. 

The levels are intensified by a busted meter: Candace is always lurking on the top screen ready to bust her brothers, but give her a piece of cake and she’ll get distracted. There’s something about the omnipresence of Candace as she’s slowly freaking out that makes me really happy. 

Mini games and puzzles are peppered throughout, some pretty good like this spatial puzzle that took some getting used to:

Others, like hammering and welding seemed unbefitting of Ferb’s tremendous skills (and the skills of the player, for that matter). As the game leveled up, though, these mini games got better. 

Fans of the show are sure to like this game. It’s got a lot of the same humor of the show, from Phineas’s quips to gags like roller coaster that takes a tunnel to China before launching into outer space. A whole level is dedicated to the fabulous S’Winter episode (that’s Winter in the Summer for non-watchers), and fans will appreciate that the game leads up to playing as Perry the Platypus’s alter-ego, Agent P.  

And for no other reason than the mere mention of Phineas and Ferb makes me start singing this, I give you S to the I to the M to the P. 

I know, I know… I didn’t post a single thing on Father’s Day! My only lame excuse is that we were returning home from vacation that day and I wanted to use the two brain cells that were still firing after our cab ride home from JFK to celebrate the Mac Daddy. It doesn’t mean I don’t think dads are the coolest people ever, because I do. To make up for my Father’s Day shame, I’m putting together a list of some of my favorite daddy bloggers for your enjoyment. 

Book Dads - while raising their son, these two dads discovered themselves surrounded my mommy culture and formed this delightful (and necessary) blog to spotlight books with positive views of fathers and fatherhood.

GeekDad - I am a devoted reader of Wired’s GeekDad for all things geek - television, movies, video games, and all kinds of geeky trips to take and projects to do with your geeklets. 

Zooglobble - Stephan Shepherd, father of two, is the king supreme of children’s music. I’ve discovered more great music for my family through Zooglobble than through any other source.

Daddy Types - I’ve talked about Daddy Types before as a must-know blog for new parents. Greg Allen serves up entertainment in the form of bizarro parenting news and modern and mid-century design for children. 

Z Recommends and Punnybop - OK, I grant you that these are more of a mom-and-pop blogs, but dad Jeremiah McNichols does some awesome daddy-blogging. And, as @zrecsmom recently shared with me on Twitter, this Z Recs dad does some DIY toy building using wind-up toys with his daughter, which is just about the coolest thing ever. 

And, finally, for straight-up laughs about life from a dad’s perspective, I head to Metrodad and Outnumbered.

Happy belated Father’s Day to all the dads. I’ll try to do Father’s Day better next year.

Let’s jump into the way-back machine. The 1990s. Chicago. I think it was a city law that all summer long you had to listen to Bob Marley. I’m not sure if that’s still the case, but I’m guessing you can still find Legend on 99% of all Chicago jukeboxes.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s not been sunny lately in NYC. At all. So yesterday, when the clouds parted and sun streamed in through the wide-open windows, I found myself thoroughly enjoying Ziggy Marley’s new Family Time with the summertime zeal that I used to listen to his dad’s music so many years ago. 

This album is so earnest you’d think it would be saccharine, but instead it’s just really, really happy music. Try not to groove along with charming “I Love You Too”.

There are some remarkable guest appearances that include Paul Simon, a reading of Is There Really a Human Race by Jamie Lee Curtis, and a terrific duet with Laurie Berkner called Future Man, Future Lady. The duet I’m most excited about is This Train, with the one and only Willie Nelson. 

Family Time is, in fact, a great soundtrack for family time.

You may recall that I was one of the lucky few to score an advance reader’s copy of Suzanne Collin’s Catching Fire at Book Expo. I immediately took a picture of it, such was my disbelief at holding a copy. And now I’m ready to give it to you, but more on that in a bit.

Catching Fire is the follow-up to the incredible Hunger Games. Now, unlike so many of the good fans out there, I did not have the opportunity to read it the same night, or even the same weekend. No, it took me a vacation to have the time to enjoy it. And now I can tell you that it’s as unbelievable as the first. Katniss Everdeen is truly now one of my favorite fictional heroines. It’s especially poignant to read it now while also reading about the happenings in Iran, but I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers. 

I stalked introduced myself to Suzanne Collins at Book Expo, and a quick first impression suggested that she is a lovely and pleasant woman. One could imagine a bird coming and landing on her shoulder as she walks through a flower-lined forest path. And yet, on reading The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, you realize that there are some very dark recesses in her imagination. VERY dark. And I’m thankful for that, because it’s what makes her books so extraordinary. 

Anyway, I’ve finished the book and now it seems tragic for it to sit on my shelf when it makes such fantastic vacation reading (the publication date is not until September 1). So, I’d like to give it to one of you. To enter, simply leave a comment on this post. I’ll choose a winner at random from all comments left by Sunday 6/28 at midnight EST. 

Meanwhile, if you haven’t read The Hunger Games, I highly, highly recommend it. I talked my mom’s ear off suggesting it for her book group, whose latest selection is Twilight. Those of you who have read both books will understand that we’re talking about two different leagues here. 

UPDATE: Congratulations, Alyssa! You’ll be Catching Fire this summer. 

When you’ve finished your visit at the Peoria Zoo, be sure to pass through neighboring Washington, Illinois for a journey back in time. In the town square you’ll discover Holland’s Mercantile. My niece, 7-year-old local historian, informs me that it was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite store to visit when he was going to court in Metamora, IL.

It’s great bit of history for a place that truly exists in a time capsule, one unmarked by modern PC parenting. Up front is a long expanse of candy you can buy in bulk while waiting for your phosphate at the counter. Among the candy are licorice pipes and candy cigarettes. We did a double-take seeing some of this stuff.

The back room is a fantastic little toy store, where Melissa and Doug meets Cowboys and Indians.

There were species of toys extinct in NYC … ray guns, cap guns, cowboy guns… all manner of toy guns sure to enrage the bugaboo-wielding crowd.

On spotting all of these toys while shopping with my daughter, I felt… glee. Pure joy that’s hard to explain. In part it’s because I used to love collecting toy guns before Olive was born, which as a responsible-seeming Manhattan parent I parted with in a yard sale.

But in part the joy came from being in a place where I could let my guard down for a short time, releasing ever so briefly the PC filter through which everything must pass. Water guns are taboo in my neighborhood, but were such a big part of summertime fun in my childhood. And, they have yet to turn me into a violent criminal.

It’s not like I’m about to advocate children having candy cigarettes or matchstick erasers. There’s a reason these things go the way of the dodo. But can an atomic blaster with foam rockets be all bad?

What’s your reaction to seeing these things? Glee? Horror? Something in between?

We are lucky to find ourselves in Peoria, Illinois just two weeks after the Peoria Zoo doubled in size with the addition of the new Africa! exhibit. The original zoo is about the size of the Central Park Zoo, with animals that are even cooler.

Tigers and camels are the premiere attractions in the first half of the zoo. Olive found the camels particularly hilarious, especially when checking out how many humps the camel poop has (anyone with Taro Gomi’s Everyone Poops will know what I’m talking about).

There were also animals totally unfamiliar to us, like takin, sichuan, and binturong.

We hustled over to Africa! before the threat of thunderstorms sent the animals indoors. With a price tag of 27.5 million dollars, it’s money well spent. Bridges take guest all around the African savannah, close to lions and zebras and face to face with giraffes.

Should you find yourself in Central Illinois, be sure to stop by this cool zoo.

The fam and I are currently vacationing in Chicagoland. I grew up in the ‘burbs and lived in the city for six years, and it’s always good to be back. I’ve heard a lot about Millennium Park, and have even seen it from the airplane, but this is the first trip where we’ve had the chance to go.

Our first stop was the “bean” (Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate scupture), which was like a pilgrimage after seeing Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s The Beckoning of Lovely. Give a 4-year-old her distorted reflection, and you can count on a good 45 minutes of activity right there.

Next up was what I was most taken with in Millennium Park, The Crown Fountain by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. I had seen pictures of this but never quite realized its interactive quality. Giant faces appear, and every once in a while they shoot out a spray of water. The fun comes from guessing when it’s going to happen. The faces would smile, then purse their lips together and you think that it’s going to spray, but then they’d just smile again, causing the crowd of kids waiting beneath to groan. Finally, the fountain would burst forth, delighting the kids running through the water. I haven’t seen art this kid-friendly since Pipilotti Rist’s “Pour Your Body Out.”

While we were walking around we noticed crowds of people taking a Segway tour of the park. I think Olive’s grandma and grandpa might be coming back for that one.

Then we found a little, uncrowded mini-golf course. Olive and my niece golfed while the grown-ups walked through the course drinking a $10 pitcher of sangria. Can you think of anything better?

Then there’s also the stunning Frank Gehry-designed pavilion, home to free concerts and events. Millennium Park gets two thumbs up, and if we were still living in Chicago I’m sure we’d be there all the time.

I’m happy to introduce lovely and talented guest blogger Margaret Crocker. Margaret is a writer and content producer of children’s media, and is currently getting her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Check out her website for a sampling of her fabulousness. Please be kind to her so she comes back and visits us often. 

Brooklyn Superhero Supply 

I notice an unassuming store on 5th Ave in Brooklyn. Its sign is industrial gray, and it has a LOT of words on it. Some of those words are “invisibility,” “smokescreens,” and even “underground lairs.” This is worth investigating.

The Store

What a find! I’ve been looking everywhere for Anti-Matter, not to mention a new secret identity (Myrtle Hopkins––she is 57 and recently divorced). Of course, before you buy anything, you must take a vow to use it for good, not evil. How reassuring!

The Secret Door

Whoa! I pull on a metal shelf to reach a can of Truth Serum, and it swings open to reveal a whole other room––a cross between a curiosity shop and Bruce Wayne’s library. I slip in while the clerk is looking the other way.

The Writing Center, 12:30PM

Fascinating. A class of 15-30 students sits on the floor, shouting ideas about character, setting, and plot. These are not the kind of ideas that lead to things like “Everybody Loves Raymond” or The Sun Also Rises. These are genius ideas, resulting in stories about hybrid piranha monkeys. The class is on a field trip to write picture books, sitcom screenplays, or choose-your-own-adventure stories. It is not a quiet process.

3:00 PM

The field trippers are replaced by an endless stream of kids armed with backpacks. There is work to be done! A few gentle grownups mingle, ready to help the homeworked or suggest a creative project for the homeworkless. 

6:00 PM

Next up: some more storytellers arrive to make a book about Treasure Hunting. Or perhaps a Love Song for the Broken Hearted. Whatever the workshop, these kids will walk out with something to show for their efforts: a short film, a CD, or a bound book. Because if a tree falls in the woods reciting a poem about hybrid piranha monkeys, did it really happen if nobody publishes it?

Listen to “The Quest” by Rory M. from the Writing for Radio workshop

8:00 PM

I am now overwhelmed with curiosity about 826NYC, so I pepper Education Director Joan Kim for details. She’s had a long day, so she tells me to check the website for more details. Can I volunteer? I ask. Check the website. Can I send my fictional child Jack Clooney to this wonderful place? Check the website. Does the Superhero Crew ever jetpack over to local schools for fieldwork? CHECK. THE. WEBSITE. Joan pulls down the security gate and locks it firmly. Time to go home.

Not from NYC? No problem! The organization has chapters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Ann Arbor, and Boston. And they all need your help to stay open and do their thing.

To get a closer look at 826NYC, check out this video.

When last we left off talking about Super WHY!, I was sent home from the Super WHY! blogger event with a backpack full of swag homework for me and Olive. It was everything we needed to do a Super WHY! Five Day At-Home Workshop. They have created this 5 day workshop to build on the curriculum of the show through games and worksheets. 

I’ll start by saying that Olive and I are a receptive audience to this type of thing. A few months ago, because Olive is so in love with the chart episode of Sid the Science Kid, we made this chart to track the growth of our newly-planted seeds. 

With gusto we tore open the PBS backpack, and for about 5 minutes I tried to follow the step-by-step instructions before dismissing them entirely. They lost me at the “Super WHY! Pre-Assessment” for two reasons. One, it was a lazy Saturday morning and I didn’t really want to test my daughter in this way. I know that they want me to have done this step so I can see just how much she’s learned from the workshop, but it’s not my style. The other reason is that some of the material is completely inappropriate for her.

You may remember that I’m coming off of producing Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read, so I know a bit about steps to reading and literacy standards for different age groups. Here we get back to the tall order issue with the show itself - trying to teach core reading skills to the massively large age group of 3 to 6-year-olds. I recognize that through repetition of the show and these activities, I can get Olive to read as sight words the words of the show. But that’s really not what’s important to me right now. I just want to keep developing her love of books, and so far so good. 

Now, my problem is with this idea of the workshop trying to teach skills that are too advanced for her. That’s not to say we didn’t have lots of fun with some of the activities (the age-appropriate ones, naturally). The character masks were a big hit, and Olive enjoyed doing the kinds of alphabet worksheets she’s already doing in her Pre-K class. 

One of our favorites was a scavenger hunt, taping letters to things around the house that begin with the letter. It was fun when my husband tried to guess what each letter referred to, “Why is there an I on the door?” “Because it’s Inside!” And look how well our P for Plants are doing! 

My recommendation is to head over to the robust PBS Parents website, skip past the workshop and go straight to the activities that will be exciting for your child and are at the right level for your child. There’s an excellent Child Development Tracker which will help you know what to expect from your child at different ages, along with activity recommendations. Not only does it span ages 1-8, but it cuts across all different subject matters and PBS Kids shows. I’m going to have to go browsing for some more Sid chart activities!

And for some Super WHY! fun this Saturday, visit Toys”R”Us between 12:00 and 2:00 for a Super WHY! Play Day, with giveaways, story time, and alphabet bingo.