I was so saddened yesterday to read about a 12 year old girl who drowned on a class trip to Long Beach. I have been reading with dread the stories over the past few years of adults and children drowning at the beaches around NYC, frequently due to strong currents and riptides.

We can not go back in time and save this little girl or the others that have died due to rip currents, but I hope to spread the word to all parents to educate yourself and your children to know what to do in case they are carried off in a strong current. Knowing what to do in a riptide can make the difference between life and death.

Summer is one of the most exciting times on this site. I love digging up all the amazingly cool stuff to do around the city all summer long, and so much of it is free. We spend so many summer days just running around the city, checking out neighborhoods and places we don't have time to get to all year long. It's really fun and I love sharing it here with you.

Our Summer Fun Guide is where you'll find all those posts collected in one place. It's got our lists of the best beaches, swimming pools, neighborhood itineraries, music festivals, concerts, outdoor movies, sports, even places to eat and drink. And, of course, there's our list of 100 Free Things to Do this Summer with Kids in NYC (not to mention our event calendar which is jam packed with fun stuff to do too).

What more could you possibly need to have an awesome summer? How about winning a Flip Video Camcorder!

Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. Also called Midsummer, (as in Shakespeare's Midsummer's Night's Eve), the summer solstice has been celebrated around the world since neolithic times with traditions that are now a mix of Pagan and Christian rituals.

When I was a kid there used to be a Summer Solstice Celebration in Riverside Park that we attended every year which involved staying up all night long making music. It was one of the quirky, artsy things that I was lucky to experience growing up in NYC.

Today there are slightly less out there ways to celebrate the Solstice that still capture the sense of freedom, revelry, and hapenstance of those magical celebrations and truly are only in NYC events and are the types of cool events that your children will remember for the rest of their lives.

THIS EVENT IS FULL. PLEASE CHECK BACK FOR MORE EVENTS LIKE THIS.

I'm teaming up with Universal Pictures to host an exclusive preview of the hot new family movie, Despicable Me. This is not one of those things where you show up and maybe get a seat. We will have the whole theater just for Mommy Poppins readers and everyone with a ticket is guaranteed a seat, plus there are going to be goodie bags and free popcorn and soft drinks.

Photo of the Week: A pie eating contest at Mohonk in the Hudson Valley last weekend. I tried to convince my husband to take part, but he wasn't into it. I can't imagine why—although apparently the kids said the pies were too hot and one kid kept having to stop to pick the pie out of his nose.

Last week we launched our Family Travel Guide and it wasn't until the middle of this week that somebody asked me if there was supposed to be more than two posts in it. Uh, yeah. Apparently the only one who could see the guide was me. Nice.

So I am relaunching our Family Travel Guide with a great new feature—visibility! Woohoo.

Elsewhere in Gotham, this week was all about lists:

Photo of the Week: This guy was waiting for the bus with us on Randall's Island last weekend and was dyin to show us the colassal striped bass he caught out of the East River. Believe me, it wasn't the worst smelling thing on the bus that day.

Woohoo, long Weekend! Memorial Day Weekend unofficially kicks off the summer season, meaning the beaches, sprinklers and swimming pools are all opening starting this weekend. Also opening this weekend is the new Luna Park amusement park at Coney Island.

We love New York City as much as the next guy (maybe more), but, as they say, distance makes the heart grow fonder—so we love getting out of the city too. As Memorial Day Weekend rolls around we get pretty excited about summer day trips and weekend getaways and hopefully plans for a longer summer family vacation too.

In order to get organized for all those family travel plans, we've created our new Family Travel Guide, a page dedicated to all our posts about family travel destinations, family-friendly resorts, car-free day trips and some frugal family travel tips, including our great lists of 30 Family Friendly Day Trips From NYC and 75 Best Family Vacation Destinations to get you started.

In the past few years the DOE has implemented many new standardized assessments for NYC public schools. Internally, there has been some grumbling, particularly from school administrators who have felt like these reviews do not paint accurate portraits of their schools and are unfair assessments, but are these reports useful for parents? What can you learn from these reviews when looking to choose a school for your child? And what other tools are available for parents?

Below find an overview of the different DOE school report cards, what each one will tell you and other useful tools in researching the best NYC Public Schools for your child.