It's a truly mixed bag of news this week, including cool new stuff—a tot lot in Central Park, oversize Jenga and Connect Four in Hudson Square, a drop-in craft spot/mini-spa for kids in Bed-Stuy, a children' ticket deal for Annie on Broadway—alongside scarier news like the financial woes of the Village Halloween Parade, local casualties of the federal government shutdown and higher-priced public school lunches. Plus: A new entrepreneur program for kids, a facelift for the Children's Museum of the Arts, the retirement of an animation great and more.

Back in my carefree, pre-child days The Huntington was a favorite weekend destination. I would tour the galleries and stroll the grounds, admiring sculptures and snapping artistic pics; I usually planned my trip around a posh-feeling high tea.

When it came time to share the Gardens with my daughter, I wasn’t sure how well she would fit into this bastion of gentility. Turns out The Huntington is a child’s paradise. The Huntington Botanical Garden is particularly kid friendly. Read on for the top spots when visiting The Huntington with kids and when you can go for free. 

Carolyn Dalgliesh and I belong to the same club – the Parents of Kids with Sensory Processing Disorder Club. OK, it’s not actually a club, but we both know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed by trying to manage the challenges of our sensory kids’ rigid, anxious, and distracted behaviors. After each of our kids’ diagnoses, we both wanted to figure out how to cultivate moments of fun with our families and make our homes more than our sensory children's emotional unloading zones (as Carolyn so astutely puts it). While I set out to read everything I could get my hands on about sensory issues, Carolyn, a professional organizer, started coming up with her own strategies to provide support to her sensory child at home. Ten years later, she is a bit of an expert on the subject. In fact, she has written a book about it, The Sensory Child Gets Organized.

Keep reading for a whole houseful of super helpful tips from Carolyn for getting your child – with or without sensory issues – organized at home.

When my son was just in kindergarten, he came home from school asking if he could go to an opera. Although I was impressed that my five-year-old even knew what an opera was, I was hesitant to plunk down big bucks to take him to what I worried would feel like a long, boring concert sung in a language he didn't understand.

That's when I started looking around to see if there were any opera companies in New York City mounting productions specifically for children. And guess what? In a culture capitol like NYC, of course there are. At these special familly-friendly opera performances, the length is edited down to accommodate shorter attention spans, the libretto is translated into English, and puppets and audience interaction are added to keep kids interested and engaged. (Let's face it, those are nice perks for grown-ups, too.)

My now eight-year-old son did indeed see his first opera while still in kindergarten. Every year the Metropolitan Opera does a family production during the holidays and we saw Hansel and Gretel. My son was riveted—even from the nosebleed seats! In addition to the Met's holiday offering, which sells out months in advance, there are other smaller, less expensive New York City companies that produce opera for kids all year round.

Unfortunately, National Costume Swap isn't happening in 2015. My eight-year-old daughter is the Imelda Marcos of costumes. Every Halloween she's invited to a terrifying number of celebrations and she insists on a different outfit for each one. I happen to love dressing up, too, so, I admit, I indulge her. Trouble is, she outgrows her costumes much more quickly than I do mine—we never get more than one Halloween season out of them.

Instead of throwing all of those barely used costumes into the donation bin (or worse, the landfill), we've found a better, eco-friendly option that saves us money and is actually pretty fun: Halloween costume swaps. At these community events, you trade your child's old costumes for new-to-you outfits. My daughter enjoys tearing through tables piled high with outlandish getups, and I love hanging on to my cash.

Costume swaps have really taken off in popularity in recent years as families become ever more frugal and environmentally aware. In fact, there's even an annual National Costume Swap Day! This year's edition officially takes place on Saturday, October 12, but local community organizations across the country hold costume swaps on various dates throughout the month. We've got the scoop on how to find costume swaps in your area and tips on how to host your own.

My daughter and I see a mind-boggling number of kids' shows every year. (One of the exhausting perks of being a Mommy Poppins blogger!) Some are wonderful; others, not so much (those are the shows I don't write about).

While there are lots of New York City theater troupes mounting productions for kids, there's one that consistently stands out: the New Victory Theater. Based in a beautiful and historic Off Broadway house, the nonprofit company produces a full season of eclectic works aimed at families. And when I say families, I mean every single member: I find that I often enjoy the shows as much as my daughter because they're offbeat, thought-provoking and never dumbed down or condescending. But the New Victory is much more than just a place to go see a show. Through a range of interactive educational activities like performance workshops and camps, post-show talk-backs and TXT Marks the Spot (a seriously cool high-tech scavenger hunt after select performances), the organization is raising the next generation of theatergoers and performing artists.

As longtime fans, we here at Mommy Poppins are excited to announce our new partnership with the New Victory Theater, which brings our readers more access to its incredible lineup of shows, ticket discounts and two exclusive special events (stay tuned for details). We begin with a preview of the New Victory 2013-2014 season, including show recommendations for every age and stage, tips on how to save money on tickets, exclusive video from the upcoming productions and details about enriching programs that may be under your radar.

I feel like summer just ended and school just started. Yet already it's fall and my daughter is complaining because we haven't figured out our family Halloween costumes. To help you avoid seasonal nagging in your home, we've started overhauling our NYC Kids Halloween Guide, including updating our roundups of pumpkin patches near NYC, on Long Island and in New Jersey, as well as posts about popular Halloween happenings that require advance tickets like the Great Jack o' Lantern Blaze in Historic Hudson Valley and the New York Botanical Garden's Haunted Pumpkin Garden.

Other posts of note: Our Westchester site wrote about the new Mount Kisco drop-in creative spot, Arts Garage, part of the popular go-kart track and bowling alley Grand Prix. Our bloggers in Los Angeles shared ideas for managing your child's food allergies in school and at parties. Meanwhile our Boston site has tips about being a good spectator at your kids' sporting events and 20 ways to ease the pain of flying internationally with a toddler. That info should come in handy if you're inspired to visit Bristol, UK after reading our post about all the fun things to do with kids there.

Feeling lucky this week? Use that mojo to enter to win our current giveaways: a children's art class at the Art Studio on the Upper West Side and a family four-pack to see The Wiggles in concert in Westbury, Long Island. Both giveaways end soon so enter right away.

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