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!

If you’re in the Chicago area at all now through September, check out the “CoolGlobes - Hot Ideas For a Cooler Planet” project. CoolGlobes consists of 124 sculpted globes, five feet in diameter, designed by artists, organizations, children, and others, each with a message on how to help the planet. They’re on display along Chicago’s waterfront on Lake Michigan (here’s the map of where to find them). Take the time to read about the project - Chicago has taken many steps to help become a green city, including using hybrid buses, building green libraries and schools, and encouraging bike riding as transportation. There are even great paper mache recipes to make your own globe!

The globes are the coolest. The one you see here is globe #77, titled “Take Simple Steps,” created by a grassroots organization in Chicago called teeniegreenie.org (and no, I didn’t know about them when I named teensy! Yes, I already emailed them!) I think for me, and so many others, this motto is a great mantra. Take the time to look at all the globes - they are true works of art and are truly inspiring!

Two things I absolutely love are farmers markets and San Francisco.  Now, combine the two for a match made in heaven!  If you’re in the area, take your kids to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, a California Certified Farmers Market run by CUESA, the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture.  Bring your kids not only to taste amazing, locally grown food at its freshest, but to meet the farmers who actually grow the food!  You mean food doesn’t come from supermarkets? (I got that question yesterday…).  The Market is located at the Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco, and is open Tuesdays from 10am to 2pm and Sundays from 8am to 2pm. There are also tons of cooking and speaking events, and a list of farmers are on the site so you can find those perfect Pink Pearl or Black Twig apples you’ve been craving…

One thing I miss most about Florida is living a stone’s throw away from the beach.  Boca Raton, specifically, has an amazing number of parks and recreation centers to teach kids about nature and conservation efforts.  One of our favorite weekend spots was Gumbo Limbo Nature Center, located across the street from the Atlantic.  Gumbo Limbo is a modest environmental complex, but it’s full of eco-education (ok, and fun too), inside and out.  They have saved many turtles and other fish, housed in large tanks around the center.  Walk through the nature trail, sit in the butterfly garden, watch a shark feeding or browse the eco-friendly gift shop. 

Now is a very special time of year at Gumbo Limbo.  From July through September, GL offers turtle hatchling release evenings for the general public to share (one of only three places in Florida).  It’s an incredible sight to see a group of tiny turtles make their way out to sea.  They tag and track the turtles to see who comes back in 20 years!  Check the calendar to find a class or lecture perfect for your little naturalist!