October is here and you know what that means – time to pick out pumpkins and Halloween costumes! Get in the autumn spirit at Heaven Hill Farm’s Great Pumpkin Festival or Harvest Fest at the NJ State Botanical Gardens. If you’re looking for a little non-pumpkin action, bring the family  to the WBGO Kids Jazz Concert or check out birds of prey at Palisades Interstate Park’s Hawks over the Hudson. And remember, you can find a full list of weekend activities in our Event Calendar.

Expert baby wearers and new parents alike will find something to celebrate during International Baby Wearing week October 7-13.  Intended to raise awareness about baby wearing, the week will include free, fun activities, plus opportunities to try different types of baby carriers.

UPDATE: Our iPhone app is no longer active, but our site is optimized for use on mobile and has maps to find locations near you. You can add it to your home screen too by dragging the URL to your phone. 

Finally, after months of work and lots of reader support, the Mommy Poppins app is now available for download! We're very excited to share it with you and look forward to hearing what you think, too.

We created this app to help families find the best places for kids to learn, create, shop, eat and play indoors and out while on the go in NYC and beyond. You'll find the same curated content that we offer on our site, all tried and tested by local moms so you're in the know before you go.

A very heartfelt thank you to everyone who donated and spread the word about our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that helped ensure that the app could be offered for FREE.

Here are 5 things we hope you'll love about the Mommy Poppins app. Or just go ahead and download it now for FREE in the iTunes app store and decide for yourself what your favorite features are.

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.