Running around and exploring New York is great, but sometimes with kids and toddlers on the scene you'd rather just explore the city from the comfort of your desk chair. This post is a collection of sites that take you to great off the beaten track places around NYC without ever getting off your...laptop.

Whether you use it as a little fantasy armchair exploring or to plan real excursions to tote the kids on, either way you'll get a cool reminder of all the nooks and crannies that make New York City amazing and endlessly fun to explore.

One of the freaky things about having kids is that you'll be tooling along in your life when, WHAMM!, they'll say or do something that just knocks your socks off and makes everything stop. If you're lucky, you're not too self-obsessed with blogging or reading headlines on I Can Has Cheezburger to notice and you do stop and appreciate the moment and figure out what's really going on in those little brains. This happened to me this weekend.

While I was very busy in the front of the car doing something important like thinking of soup taglines, a little voice chirped up from the back seat. It said something like this:

"You know, I really understand why J is having such a hard time being four. Because I remember when I was four and I had to grow up a lot and go to big kid school and do a lot of stuff for myself and J was just born so he was a baby and got to have everything done for him and I was jealous and it was hard."

OK so her grammar was probably better than my recounting of it, but that was the gist of it.

In the series NYC Nanny 101: The finding and care of your nanny Parts 1 and 2 I've tried to lay out some basic tips on finding a caregiver in New York, the interview and salaries. But there are lots of different perspectives on this issue. And some of them will make you wet your pants. Enjoy:

I should never admit this, but when I was younger I kind of liked the idea of being a soccer mom. The image of popping my athletic kids into a station wagon and driving them around our little town to their various activities seem kind of nice. It does make the suburbs sound kind of appealing to think about little leagues and soccer games and all of that. But I don't think I could have really done it. It's just not in my DNA code. Luckily you can have all that team sport goodness right here in NYC - no car or mommy jeans necessary.

Mommy Poppins reader, Robin, says she's found a few nannies to interview through other nannies, friends and craigslist (just as we suggested in part 1 of this series)...but, now what! As Robin plainly puts it, "My husband and I agree on one thing - we have no idea what we are doing."

So you've gotten some names, what next? How do you conduct a nanny interview?: What questions do you ask? How much should you offer to pay? What are you forgetting? In part two of our series on the finding and care of your nanny we will answer these and other pressing questions.

The Little Red Lighthouse may be one of those New York sites that everybody thinks how nice it would be to go, but never quite finds enough of a reason to trek up there to see it.

Nannies. They're all around you, and yet, somehow the perfect one seems so unattainable. How do you find a nanny in New York City? Where do you look? What do you look for? How do you know they're the right one? And what do you do once you get them? How much will you have to pay? And can you find someone to work the crazy hours you need? I don't have all the answers, but I'll give you my honest, hard-won, down-to-earth experience with this issue and you can add it to all the other junk you hear and make up your own mind.

This is going to be a several part series on childcare. Today's post is all about how to find a caregiver in NYC.

Some kids are obsessed with the subways of NYC. They memorize the maps and know the trains inside and out. Other kids amble along the city streets never giving a second thought to what lies beneath. But at some point every kid wants to know what those big steam chimneys are for and if there really are alligators in the sewers. Here's some really cool places you can start to explore the world beneath our streets.