Media Macaroni

I know you must be wondering… Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins’ follow-up to The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, came out two weeks ago, and yet there’s been nary a mention of it on the blog. I’ve been remiss in telling you that there’s this other new blog that you should check out, one where you just might find me writing about Mockingjay.

You know the awesome blog, GeekDad? Meet GeekDad’s better half, GeekMom, started by GeekDad’s editor Ken Denmead along with all of the female contributors to GeekDad: Natania Barron, Kathy Ceceri, Corrina Lawson, and Jenny Williams. And I’m pleased as punch to be a contributing geek. Please go check it out!

If John Lasseter and David Levinthal were hanging out together, downing bottles of wine in Belgium, they too might have come up with the crazy awesome film, A Town Called Panic. It came out last year, and my husband only just told me of its existence. He watched it with Olive last week, reading her every subtitle, and I watched it with Olive today as she told me everything that was going to happen (now that he heard the film once, she no longer required subtitle translation.)

A Town Called Panic stars Cowboy, Indian, and Horse. Cowboy and Indian have forgotten Horse’s birthday, and they decide to build him a barbecue leading to events that destroy their collective home. That’s about all I want to tell you so that the movie will be full of delightful surprises. If this trailer makes you happy, chances are the movie will, too.*

*Unless you object to toys nearly getting into a bar fight, minor swearing in the subtitles, excitable farmers, and horse romance.

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:

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.