This Week: Start Celebrating Halloween, Best Bets for Columbus Day Weekend in NYC & Beyond, Awesome Pics of NYC's New Lego Store

10/9/14 - By Raven Snook

It's beginning to look a lot like Halloween! This is truly my favorite time of year (old Goth habits die hard). In many ways, I think it's even more magical for families than the holidays. That gloriously ghoulish pic is from Red Hook, Brooklyn, which just happens to be our neighborhood of the month. Looks like a great trick-or-treating destination!

Of course, Halloween was a major theme across all our sites including the brand-new Mommy Poppins Philadelphia. With the long Columbus Day weekend coming up, it's worth browsing all of our regional sites for seasonal day trip inspiration like Halloween trains in New Jersey, corn mazes near Philly, haunted houses in Westchester and pumpkin picking throughout the tri-state area.

In addition to having lots of family fun this three-day weekend, don't forget to enter the lottery for FREE fall swimming lessons courtesy of the NYC Parks Department. And speaking of water, our Los Angeles site has a wonderful list of ten easy ways to save water inspired, sadly, by California's ongoing drought. Even though we're not suffering from one here in the northeast, these ideas help parents teach kids about the importance of conservation, no matter where you live.

Here's what else we covered on the NYC site this week:

OUR LATEST VIDEOS

We updated two of our most popular Halloween posts: day trip-worthy haunted houses in nearby Westchester County and our roundup of 32 FREE Halloween celebration for NYC kids.

Is your kid a major Lego lover? Then hightail it over to the Manhattan's gorgeous new Lego Store—one look at our slide show and you'll be halfway out the door.

We finished up our series of preschool admissions posts with a list of the top ten topics to discuss on a preschool tour.

The artsy waterfront community of Red Hook, Brooklyn is our neighborhood of the month. We kicked off our coverage with a roundup of the 25 best things to do with kids in the area.

Is Disney's new live-action adaptation of Judith Viorst's children's book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day worth seeing? According to one parent and a bunch of kids, the answer is yes.

Columbus Day weekend is the perfect time to take a day trip to a nearby farm for fall fun like hayrides, harvest festivals and pumpkin patches. You can find even more destination inspiration in our NYC Getaways Guide.

Prefer a NYC staycation? Our best bets for the weekend include FREE fun like Open House NY, a bunch of harvest festivals and a Sesame Street Family Day at Lincoln Center.