This Week: Spring NYC Day Trips, Best New Museum Exhibits for Kids, NYC Family-Friendly Restaurant Guide

Are we the only ones who felt like this was a long, slow week? Maybe it has something to do with this being the first full week back after spring break. The awesome spring weather doesn't help either: How can we focus on work when there are parks and playgrounds calling out to us? Not to mention the hypnotic tinkling of the invading ice cream trucks.
Still, we found time to do some work. We launched our NYC Kid-Friendly Restaurant Guide and even added a pair of tasty new posts: Restaurants where kids can make their own food and an international food crawl on Ninth Avenue to go with our Midtown West coverage.
If you're looking to take a seasonal day trip, our Long Island site profiled New York State Parks in Nassau and Suffolk Counties that are filled with all kinds of outdoor fun like boating, fishing, biking, horseback riding and golfing, not to mention the opportunity to commune with nature. Meanwhile, our New Jersey site has a roundup of animal-filled farms where kids can get up close and personal with alpacas, llamas, sheep, goats, ponies, chickens, miniature horses and more.
And those are just a few ways to take advantage of spring now that it's sprung. Here's what else we covered on our NYC site this week:
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We've written about many an indoor play space on Mommy Poppins but nothing is quite like the community-run It Takes a Village in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Our spring culture coverage continued with a roundup of the best new museum exhibits for kids this season.
Speaking of cool exhibits for kids, we reviewed Whales: Giants of the Deep at the American Natural History Museum, which is great for tweens obsessed with aquatic life.
Got kids who like to play with their food? Then they'll love this list of NYC restaurants where they can help make their own meals.
Our month-long focus on Midtown West continued with a look at some of the culturally diverse cuisines you can introduce your kids to on Ninth Avenue.
We traveled up to Westchester County (soon to be the focus of a new Mommy Poppins site) to check out the recently opened Legoland Discovery Center in Yonkers and we have a bunch of important visiting tips.
A new season means a new roundup of deals: Save on camps, classes and birthday party packages.
Best bets for the weekend include the Queens County Farm Museum's annual Children's Carnival, early Earth Day celebrations and the final performances of The Intergalactic Nemesis, a geektastic comic-book-inspired show at the New Victory Theater that we just loved.
About the Author

Raven is a writer, editor, performer and mom, who was born and bred in NYC, just like her husband, her mother and now, her daughter. As a writer, she's contributed articles to New York Magazine, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, the New York Post, TV Guide, Better Homes and Gardens, iVillage, AOL TV and Moviefone, Parents.com, and worked as an in-house editor for ParentsConnect.com and TimeOutKids.com. As a performer, she's appeared on many downtown stages (sometimes even for pay!), a couple of obscure films and TV shows, and The Maury Povich Show as a female drag queen. She's also the founder of Hot Mama Burlesque, the world's only all-moms burlesque show. After being the NYC editor from March 2011-March 2015, she is now happy to just be a blogger as she pursues additional writing opportunities.