Media Macaroni

Grandma and Grandpa were in town recently and feeling intrepid. That, crossed with my feeling that we’re missing out on all that the city has to offer, led to the choice to take the Staten Island Ferry… and actually leave the ferry terminal! Outside the terminal, find the S40 bus for a quick, if less than scenic, bus ride. Get off the bus when you see this lovely expanse of the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, because nestled behind these buildings is a gem of a children’s museum.

The Staten Island Children’s Museum is filled with sure-thing kid pleasers, like an old fire truck that kids can climb all over, a theater with a lighting panel and costumes, a game room filled with oversized game pieces (you could actually play human chess if you had enough people), and a giant house construction area. Olive was very interested in Great Explorations, where kids can travel through different parts of the world and be properly costumed for each one. Here she is climbing ice in the Arctic.

And searching for underwater treasures.

I particularly liked the exhibit Bugs & Other Insects for not only having areas where kids can feel like a bug, but actual bugs including: bees, roaches, scorpions, and giant millipedes that gave me the heebie-jeebies.

And, this is new on my radar, lots of little places to put a squirmy baby. You can even compare your baby’s size to giant ant larvae.

The Staten Island Children’s Museum is fabulous and well worth the trip, especially when the return trip looks like this:

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.

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.

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.

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!)

On Friday we took Olive and my niece, Elizabeth to Coney Island, and our first stop was the new Luna Park. It was a rare day. A cool, cloudy day turned into a gorgeous sunny one, and it was a Friday before school let out so there were virtually no lines for any of the rides.

That means that the girls truly became lunatics. They ran in and out of rides, stayed on some for several times in a row, and basically felt like the park was theirs. We were very happy for deciding to go with the $26 4-hour unlimited ride bracelets for the girls, and we bought ride credits for the adults for the rides where the girls needed to be accompanied.

Olive just met the 42″ height requirement for most of the rides. It helped that she’s pretty fearless, so there were few rides that she didn’t want to go on, plus a few that were clearly inappropriate for her. (This is good news for older riders – there’s a good handful of rides for older kids and adults to enjoy).

The mega hit of the day was the roller coaster, The Tickler. We dropped twenty bucks worth of adult rides to accompany the girls on their favorite ride. I seriously can’t stop watching this video of one of our rides.

That Luna Park is new means it lacks the carny feel of say Deno’s WonderWheel park next door, but hey, the day is long. We spent some quality time at Deno’s, too. (Also, the newness means that there are now clean bathrooms to use at Coney Island. Woohoo!)

Some of the same rides can be found in Central Park’s Victorian Gardens, which for us shaves a good hour off the subway ride, but with the trip to Luna Park, you still have Coney Island in all its glory.

Today my sweet little girl turns 5, marking the year she’ll be off to Kindergarten. Last year I started a new tradition, interviewing her about her favorite things on her birthday. Though she still likes some of last year’s favorites, it’s interesting to see what’s changed.

Favorite TV Show?

“Superfriends because it’s funny and all the monsters look weird.”

I created a monster when I introduced her to Superfriends. I don’t know if I can watch the Hydronoids episode one more time. This year also marked the obsession with Dinosaur Train and a love of Phineas and Ferb.

Favorite Website?

“Dinosaur Train because there’s a new game and that game is really fun. The one where you get to learn about dinosaurs, it doesn’t only have dinosaurs. It has frogs, turtles, and birds (because birds ARE dinosaurs). One of them has a dinosaur footprint pattern and I like making patterns.”

I just saw that the Dinosaur Train website won a nice award this week at Prix Jeunesse, a children’s TV festival in Germany. It’s good times from DT fans.

Favorite Toy?

“Bat girl because she is the toy I like to play with and the games I play with her are really funny.”

Hmm. Your guess is as good as mine on this one. 5-year-olds are weird.

Favorite Movie?

“Shrek because it’s funny and Shrek makes candles out of ear wax. I like all the Shreks, but I like Shrek 4 the best. My other favorite is Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs because of the spaghetti tornado and the talking monkey.”

OK, I may have prompted her here after she answered Shrek, which is our most recent movie adventure. But it’s Cloudy that’s been watched no fewer than 50 times this year, with no end in sight.

Favorite Book?

“Shrek because the princess is so ugly!”

I can’t argue with this one.

Favorite Music?

“Recess Monkey because I like the space elevator one because it has a little talky part at the beginning and it’s funny.”

The Final Funktier is played every night before going to bed. Funny, they were her favorite band last year, too.

Favorite App?

“The dinosaur game because I like making puzzles and it’s match-up puzzle dinosaurs.”

She’d talking about a great little sliding puzzle called DinoMixer.

Favorite Museum?

“The helicopter museum because I like the color green and the helicopter in it is big and green. And it has a carousel with funny creatures in it, and I like watching the creatures go around.”

MOMA takes this category the second year in a row (named the “Helicopter Museum” for the helicopter hanging in the lobby). The carousel Olive’s talking about was part of this year’s mega show, the Tim Burton exhibit.

Favorite video game?

“Mario. I like the racing one because I sometimes win.”

She’s slowly entering into the world of Mario, with Mario Kart and Super Mario. Hooray!

I can’t wait to see what the next year brings! Happy Birthday, Olive!

On Saturday, Olive and I were invited to a show at the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Nebula’s Laboratory: Life With Lucy. The last show we went to was one of the Wild Wild World series, which was a show and tell format where we learned all about nocturnal animals. Dr. Nebula’s Laboratory was more of a one woman show featuring the character of Scooter, Dr. Nebula’s assistant.

Dr. Nebula, who appears only as video clips on screen, has accidentally sent himself back in time and the only way to figure out where he is to bring him back is to analyze a footprint that he found. Scooter proceeds to talk about how footprints have lasted so long and what we can tell about them, and the show evolves into evolution.

The show’s namesake is Lucy, the skeleton, and Scooter tells us all about her. We also learn about humans evolution over time and the very first use of tools.

Overall, the show is a little bit cheeseball for adults, but boy did the kids love it. The brilliant part of the show is getting all of the kids involved. Several kids got to go on stage to demonstrate different walks and tools, and others got to find footprints around the theater.  All kids made sound effects of thunderstorms and volcanic eruptions, and they all were able to add their handprints to a mural at the end of the show. Olive was smitten.

Conveniently, the theater is located right next to the museum’s Hall of Human Origins, where we got to see Lucy and the evolving skeletons discussed in the show. Olive can tell you all about the differences between cavemen and cavewomen. It was a wonderful, science-filled afternoon. And that night we topped it off by reinforcing that bunnies are chocolate-bearing magic-makers. It’s all about consistency, right?

Check out the AMNH website for more shows. Life with Lucy will return, and other upcoming Dr. Nebula shows include: Water Works, Planetary Vacation, Dino Adventure, and the Super Cold Show. Outside of NYC? Check out the science museum near you. Every time I’m at one of these shows I think about how much I underutilize the museum resources at our disposal.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. You’re probably still wearing your costume… OK, on the off chance you don’t know about the ahead-of-her-time Ada Byron Lovelace, she’s credited with writing the first computer program while working with Charles Babbage on his invention, the Analytical Engine. She was a huge math nerd from the time she was a young girl. And who taught her math? That’s right, her mom.

I love hearing the story about Ada Lovelace, and hope to raise a little Ada myself. I always loved math and I hope to share that with my daughter. One of my fondest memories of elementary school was staying after school in 3rd Grade to learn how to multiply fractions long before the other kids (Thanks, Mrs. French, wherever you are!)

I hope to impart some of my math nerdiness into the products I make for kids. Years back I worked on computer games called Math Missions, and we named the main character Ada. That’s her on the cover.

You can still get this game for Mac and PC, and there’s even a Leapster version. It’s worth checking out, if you don’t mind me saying so.

And, while I’m on the subjects of math nerdery and self promotion, all this talk is making me realize I never plugged the line of Sylvan math workbooks I wrote last year. I wrote 16 of these (16!), ranging from Kindergarten to 5th grade and covering basic skills, games & puzzles, and applied math. We’ve got all your math workbook needs, baby.

The best part about writing them? I had a lot of help from a self-proclaimed math expert.

The American Museum of Natural History, known as the Dinosaur Museum in this house, was kind enough to invite us to their family program Wild Wild World: Awake at Night yesterday. Bat expert Rob Meis from the Cranbook Institute of Science in Michigan was the speaker in the museum’s intimate Linder Theater, and he brought with him a bevy of live nocturnal animals.

Olive and I parked ourselves in the front row, and as Meis left the stage to walk around with the animals, we found ourselves two feet away from some of these amazing creatures, which included an owl, a fruit bat, a sugar glider marsupial, and a two-toed sloth.

Meis’s presentation that worked at just the right level for the kids in the room. It was packed with interesting facts and he didn’t sugarcoat anything having to do with predators and prey. For example, did you know the small bats we get here in the northeast are so small that 300 of the them can fit in one small bat house? Or that the two-toed sloth only goes to the bathroom once a week?  We learned about how the eyes of nocturnal animals work and the different elements of animal camouflage. Meis took questions from the crowd, patiently answering every question the kids came up with. Add to that the delight of watching a sloth feed himself grapes and the sugar glider peeing all over Meis’s gloves, and you’ve got yourself a room full of delighted kids (and parents).

I’m thrilled to know about these family-centric shows that exist outside of the museum’s usual tourist-filled roster of shows. Upcoming shows include Celestial Highlights: Family Fundamentals this Tuesday in the Hayden Planetarium, giving young observers a basic understanding of constellations. The next live animal show in the Linder Theater is Predators on Saturday March 27, where wildlife expert Andrew Simmons will show an eagle, a python, and a bear cub. The show we were at was packed, so advanced tickets probably aren’t a bad idea.