Downtown NYC Kids Neighborhood Guide

This Memorial Day weekend Governors Island reopens for the season. It's truly my favorite summer destination in NYC. Whenever I go I think to myself, if they built condos here, I would totally want to buy one. (Thankfully, the island is considered a national monument, so not even Trump can get his hands on this real estate!)

This 172-acre oasis was once home to the U.S. Army and Coast Guard, and is full of quaint 19th-century houses, grassy hills and traffic-free bike paths. It's just a seven-minute ferry ride from lower Manhattan, but if you stand in a spot where the city skyline is out of view, you feel as if you've been transported to 1800s New England. In addition to being a fantastic place for families to relax and explore, the isle hosts lots of cool festivals and activities throughout the season, most of which are FREE. The ferry ride there is FREE, too.

For 2013, all of the big kid attractions will be back, including the Opening Weekend Family Festival, the Figment arts fest when the mini-golf course and Interactive Sculpture Garden debut, and the Children's Museum of the Arts Free Island Outpost. But there are also some really exciting new additions, notably a French festival of vintage carnival rides and carousels in July! Read on for the scoop on the very best things to do on Governors Island with kids this season.

I don’t like grocery shopping—it's one of my least favorite chores. I usually leave the supermarket feeling like I’ve spent too much money and questioning the quality of my purchases. While I've been slowly making the move to organic food, the prices at big-chain organic retailers can be dizzying plus I'd really like to shop locally. So I started looking into alternative options.

In the past, we've written about joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture groups), shopping at the city's greenmarkets and even growing your own indoor vegetable garden. But you can also consider joining a local food cooperative. There are a number of food coops in New York City (and not just the famous one in Park Slope, either). While currently all food coops are located in Manhattan and Brooklyn, there are efforts to start additional ones in other boroughs. We've got the scoop on how to find and join a NYC food coop, and how your family and your community can benefit.

As an intrepid Mommy Poppins blogger, I am always on the lookout for cool new ways to experience New York City with my eight-year-old son. While we're certainly up for exploring neighborhoods on our own, when I heard about the do-it-yourself mobile tours offered by Stray Boots, I thought they sounded like fun.

A Stray Boots outing is equal parts walking tour and scavenger hunt. You just download the app on your smartphone, head to the starting location and go. But the entire route isn't given to you up front: At each stop, you need to complete challenges and answer questions in order to progress to the next destination. Along the way, the app shares historical tidbits and facts about the places you visit and the surrounding area.

Stray Boots started in NYC and now offers tours in multiple cities all over the country. For our first one, my son and I and two of his friends decided on the Chinatown and Little Italy tour. While Stray Boots tours aren't specifically aimed at families, we had a great time. Best of all, even though we'd all been to Chinatown and Little Italy before, during the tour we got to see the neighborhoods in an entirely new way.