Happy New Year! It’s been a very busy holiday season for us, culminating in a move to our new home in Fort Lauderdale. One thing I absolutely love about living here is the ability to walk to around a quiet neighborhood rich in history. We also take advantage of not having to use our cars to get to restaurants, the post office, even the library (if we’re feeling a little adventurous).

Downtown Fort Lauderdale is rich in culture and activities for children as well! If you live nearby, or a planning a trip down here, don’t forget to visit the Museum of Discovery and Science and 3D IMAX theater. Right now, they’re featuring “The Climate Change Show,” a multi-media exhibit that explores the effects of global warming through special effects, weather recreations and talking sheep (it is a show, after all). For little ones, the permanent playroom includes bubble making, climbing through a make-believe rain forest, and other hands on/nature related activities. Of course, there are also huge fish tanks, turtles ponds and baby alligator tanks to delight everyone.

This weekend (starting Friday, January 2nd through Sunday, January 4th) marks the 21st annual Las Olas Art Fair, one of my favorite in this area. The streets are jam-packed with craftsman and artists featuring everything from sculpture to photography, jewelry, home goods, clothing, and whimsical things you have no need for but are fun and pretty anyway. There are also great handmade toys and stuff for kids - I’ve been known to pick up some wooden cars or funky mobiles for people. Since I’ve missed the fair the past couple of years, I’ll be sure to be on the lookout for recycled or upcycled crafts to buy report on!

With the end of the year fast approaching, talk about Thanksgiving and other holidays goes on and on, but I’ve been starting to hear conversations about that other important holiday - winter vacation, of course. I’m sure in this economy many people won’t be jetting off to too-faraway places, but there are still plenty of vacation spots offering value and fun for families.

Here in Florida, Disney World is the place our girls ask to go year round (are you surprised?). While we don’t head up there during peak tourist season, we do try to make a trip there once a year. Full of joyous music and people, not to mention the smiles that light up everyone’s faces, Disney always seems like a picture-perfect place to spend time with family.

The Center for Health, Environment & Justice wants you to know there’s a, um, dirty side to Disney - and you can do something about it. In their investigation of Disney’s cleaning practices, CHEJ found that while Disney uses twelve certified green cleaning products, they also use over 80 toxic cleaners in all their parks, hotels, restaurants and shops! Basically, the green cleaners are used at the animal parks (where the animals have high sensitivities to toxins). Hello?! Happiest place on Earth? I don’t know who budgets for their cleaning products, but if Disney can take care of their animals with such respect, I think they deserve to be told by all of us how unhappy we are with this arrangement.

On October 29th, CHEJ held a “Disney Go Green Campaign” National Day of Action, where activists and concerned parents called Disney and held get-togethers to collect letters and emails challenging Disney to step it up and have 100% eco-cleaners for their park. Although the big day has passed, you can still get in on the protesting. Visit CHEJ’s site and do all you can - send an email, and tell everyone you know about the smudge on Disney’s cleaning practices. Shouldn’t you and your kids stay healthy and safe while sharing the magic of all things Disney?

I really, really miss Fall. I am jonesing for some real autumn weather, and where better to reminisce about than Boston? For many years, Boston was just a four hour drive to amazing foliage, apple picking and general fun in this historically-rich, gorgeous for walking and touring city. If you can make it there within the next few weeks while the leaves are at their peak, enjoy and think of us Floridians who are still melting down here!

Boston Children’s Museum - This innovative museum is one of the greenest in the country! Your kids will be having too much fun inside to notice the new green roofs, energy efficiency and eco-building materials. And isn’t it amazing to know there’s a space just for kids that practices what it preaches? Don’t forget to head over to their Recycle Shop to stock up on recycled supplies for art projects and general craftiness.

If you Google “apple picking Boston,” you’ll be overwhelmed with the amount of working orchards to visit! Apple picking has been one of my favorite activities since I was a kid, from carrying around the too-large bushel to wandering around in the cool air looking for the perfect apples, and eventually going home with way more apples than you can eat or bake with. (Can you tell that I miss it?) Check out Apple Picking Boston for listings and maps by orchard name or county. Right now there are 76 apple picking goodness to choose from! There are even reviews of orchards in counties in and around Boston.

The EcoTarium in Worcester has a Great Pumpkin Festival not to be missed. This is a totally family-friendly, non-scary event from Noon to 9:00PM on Saturday, October 25th. Hundreds of hand-carved, lit pumpkins will be on display, with hayrides and planetarium shows to entertain kids of all ages. Tickets are required, so don’t forget to purchase them before you go!

If you’re looking for other autumn activities with your kids throughout New England, this great article from the Boston Globe will point you in the right direction. Boston Central is also a wonderful New England resource guide, as well as goCityKids (now owned by Nickelodeon). Any way you look at it, this is the perfect time to get outside and enjoy nature’s autumn rituals.

*Sigh* I think I’m going to bake an apple crisp this weekend…

In honor of Father’s Day this weekend, I thought I’d write about one of my favorite places in South Florida. The Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens is a beautiful natural oasis in the middle of a city, with walking gardens, lakes, and many Japanese artifacts. The Morikami is a testament to what the Boca Raton/Delary Beach area was just 100 years ago - farmland where many Japanese immigrants came to work and live. The Yamato Colony was started in 1903 by Jo Sakai, where first only men, and then families grew and harvested pineapples and winter vegetables. As the land became more desirable and began to be sold off for development during World War II, George Morikami had a vision to preserve some of the land he lived on for much of his life. He bought much of the land that is now the Morikami Gardens, and gifted the land (which took ten years to accomplish!) in 1973.

The Morikami Gardens have been ranked 8th out of more than 300 Japanese gardens outside Japan by the Journal of Japanese Gardening. It’s a wonderful place to bring kids - quiet, charming, and full of natural beauty, you’d never know that right outside is a modern world so far from the six diverse gardens, including zen gardens, bamboo clusters and flowing streams within the museum walls. The Morikami always have amazing historical exhibits, and celebrates all the major Japanese holidays and festivals, with an emphasis on children’s participation. This weekend, the Morikami is hosting an Origami with Dad afternoon, free with museum admission.

If you haven’t tried origami with your kids, it’s a great craft that you can use with scrap paper or with special origami paper from a craft store. My five year old has become pretty good with the simple origami shapes, and loves being creative with all the paper airplanes she can fly through the house. The Origami Club is a great website to visit to introduce your family to the art of paper folding!

Now that the summer is almost upon us, I thought I’d restart my “Weekend Outing” posts on Thursday. Who doesn’t need ideas about how to keep busy during the steamy, lazy days of summer? This week, let’s head over to the awfully steamy city of Houston, where the Children’s Museum is hosting a special exhibit called “My Home Planet Earth“.

My Home Planet Earth tells the story of Riff and Rosie, squirrels on a mission to find out who and what is polluting their home! Kids act as sleuths uncovering environmental issues through hands-on science. Activities include -

Rosie’s Tree House - Kids learn about allergies and indoor air quality; explore lung functions; and see dust mites under microscopes.

Marigold Marsh - Play games to learn how animals are affected by water pollution; “fish” for pollution clues; and gather samples from the water to determine what’s polluting Riff and Rosie’s habitat.

There are over 25 hands-on activities in the “My Home Planet Earth” exhibit, as well as ton of wonderful other ways to entertain your kids for at least part of an afternoon. The museum’s EcoStation, an outdoor, activities-based exhibit with puppet shows and crafts, will reopen in June. There’s also free admission on Thursdays from 5-8pm, and weekend hours will be expanded for the summer!

My husband is not the toughest person to shop for, but since this holiday season he’s traveling to a far-off place, I thought I’d be a bit greener about his gift. Instead of buying something bulky or unneeded for his travels, I decided to offset the carbon emissions from his flights through TerraPass. TerraPass is a carbon offset program that coverts your carbon creating mileage into money towards clean energy and energy efficiency projects, therefore balancing out your bad, evil, greenhouse gas-creating tendencies. Geeky? Of course! But a truly great idea for ‘that which cannot be helped’ situations, like travel or driving to the supermarket at 2AM for ice cream…

TerraPass’s carbon offset system is very easy to use - plug in the make of your car and how much you drive each year, or, if you’re flying, the route of your flight, and TerraPass calculates how much CO2 your trip with emit. It then suggests how much your milage translates into money to donate. TerraPass works with various organizations, using your money to fund ‘three types of leading-edge projects: clean energy; farm power such as dairy farm methane capture; and landfill gas capture’. To date, TerraPass members have reduced over 600 million pounds of carbon dioxide through their trip offsetting. It’s definitely a logical step to being greener and cleaner, and helping to prevent global warming!

If you’re traveling this holiday, TerraPass is an inexpensive way to be environmentally aware. TerraPass also has a College TerraPass to offset a year’s worth of dorm room emissions (if that’s even possible) - a great gift for the budding environmentalist/video game addict in your family. If you’re getting married, plug in your guests’ travel info and hey! Carbon offsets for everyone! You’ll be surprised at how affordable something like TerraPass really is - and how much less guilty it can make you feel about hopping that flight to see the family this holiday season!

If I ever make it to Central Virginia, I am heading straight to Amazement Square/The Rightmire Children’s Museum, an awesome hands-on children’s museum that’s bursting with activities and eco-friendliness. Not only does the museum boast Amazement Tower, the largest indoor climbing structure in the US (four floors high leading up to a rooftop outdoor observation deck, complete with slides, tunnels, and a zip-line), right now they also have an energy conservation exhibit called Watt’s Up? The Energy Around Us. Kids can get their hands on a solar powered model race car; create energy through wind power to turn the lights on a model home; plus explore fossil fuels and other resources that are becoming scarce. It’s way more fun to teach energy conservation than the usual “Don’t forget to turn the lights out!” holler every time they leave a room - then they can play in the tower to get rid of their energy…

What I know from family and friends who live in Portland, Oregon, is that, besides being beautiful, it’s extremely family oriented and kid-centric. I can’t wait to get out there and visit the Portland Children’s Museum. The exhibits and classes range from eclectic music and storytimes to pottery studio work, a children’s theater, hands-on waterworks room (the most popular place, I’m sure), and the traveling Arthur’s World exhibit, there until January. Kids five and up can get down and dirty in “The Garage,” a recycled-parts arts studio where kids can become designers, builders, or sculptures, and can proudly take home their recycled creations! The Garage is open every day from 1-4 p.m, and the museum is open every day of the week! Sounds like a great place to be inspired by hands-on, natural play.

Have a great children’s museum in your area? Tell me about it for our “Weekend Outing” post!

After writing about the Fundy Play Table this morning, I decided to investigate the Bay of Fundy that spans Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. I can’t believe I have never heard of this place - and I’m from the East Coast! Turns out, the Bay of Fundy is an incredible eco-attraction, an unusual place where the extreme differences in low and high tides results in the ability to walk at the bottom of the ocean, do some serious sea-kayaking, and witness eight species of whales, dolphins, seals, and birds in action. They actually boast the highest tides in the world!

The website Family Travel Files has a comprehensive list on where to explore, stay, and eat. You can find great travel packages and a ton of information. A perfect place for kids who love outdoor adventuring, whale-watching, and who love to be near the ocean! When my kids get beyond picking seashells for four hours at a time, I am so there.

To get in the school mood (ha ha), why not visit a schoolhouse museum? You can find historic schoolhouses converted into education centers all over the country. Here’s a sample -

Schoolhouse Children’s Museum, Boynton Beach, Florida - We were fortunate enough to live five minutes away from this fully restored schoolhouse museum, located in South Florida. A gem of a hands-on museum for kids as young as two, step back in time and learn about the area’s history through photos, dress up, pretend farming (the ‘milking’ cow is a fav), and an old-time Post Office and General Store, among others. Their calendar is always packed with activities, including story and music times, scavengers hunts, ice cream making, and sidewalk art classes, to name a few.

Discovery Creek Children’s Museum of Washington, DC, also has an amazing array of activities for kids of all ages. Located among four sites, including a stable, botanical, and aquatic gardens, the Historic Schoolhouse includes “12 acres of beautiful majestic hardwood forest, hiking trails, natural rock outcroppings, and a meandering creek.” Seasonal classes about insect lifecycles, natural animal habitats, and more take place both inside the schoolhouse and in nature.

Seneca Schoolhouse Museum, Seneca, Maryland - Located in Seneca National Park in Montgomery County (close to DC and Virginia), the Schoolhouse is open during the school year for “back in time” local history day trips with a costumed teacher. Also available for birthday parties - way cooler than Chuck E. Cheese, if you ask me!

To look for a children’s museum in your area, or if you’re going on vacation, check out the website for the Association of Children’s Museums. There’s still a couple of weeks left before school, and this site might give you that last idea push to keep busy!