Yes, your child will most likely come home from school with a Mother's Day gift. Perhaps a ziti collage or a bouquet of paper flowers suspended on pipe cleaners. And you will ooh and ah. And appropriately so. But why leave all the fun to school when you could celebrate Mother's Day as a family, making Mother's Day crafts together (you for your own mom, them for theirs) or Moms could even send dads off with kids to make Mother's Day gifts for a few hours and that would almost be gift enough.

Many kid venues offer Mother's Day gift-making workshops where kids can glue tissue paper flowers together, but we've gathered some unique events where kids of all ages can step the Mother's Day gift-making up a notch, even if Dad has to pitch in a bit.

Just because you have kids, doesn't mean you can't enjoy going out for a beer once in a while. And taking the kids along is fine as long as you choose your watering holes wisely. Bringing your kids to bars is a great way to hang out as a family, while you get to go out and have some fun, too. In order to keep the other patrons happy as well, these are some good general guidlines: arrive early, stick to bars with ample space (outdoor if possible) and bars that welcome kids with kid-friendly food.

If you're game for taking the kids to a family-friendly bar, here are the best ones to try:

{C}

Sure you could get a piece of dazzling jewelry, but where's the fun in that? Mother's Day is all about paying tribute to the magic of Motherhood, so choose a gift that stands up and salutes to all that is precious, magical and beautiful about moms.

Here's our list of Mother's Day Gift Ideas that will warm moms' heart and give her joy for years to come. 

Sweating like pigs: This weekend there were basically two topics of conversation in New York City, the heat and the swine flu. I can't help you much with the heat, but I do think it is important that people are well informed about the swine flu issue. Read more inside to find out the latest details, the most reliable source of information for swine flu news and what you can do to protect your family.

Oh and...more news about the new stay at home dads, a woman giving birth on fifth avenue, the secrets of the American Museum of Natural history, Lemonade Day, the new and old animals at the Bronx Zoo and more.

The weather is going to be beautiful this weekend and what better reward than to spend a wonderful afternoon in the beautiful Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, especially now that the Cherry Blossoms are in their prime. Of course, visiting the Cherry Blossoms could lead to its own reward if you enter your photographs of your children and the cherry blossoms into our Kids of Hanami Photo Contest.

Let me spell it out for you; the reward would be a Brooklyn Botanic Garden Pass, Mother's Day Luncheon at the Gardens and a generous prize package of beautiful gifts from the BBG store.

Take a look at some of the beautiful entries we've received:

This weekend will be our first really warm weekend and as if the event planners are somehow hooked up with Mother Nature, this weekend also seems to be the first weekend of Spring Fairs and Carnival events. So get your t-shirts out of the closet, leave your big bills at home and head to these wallet-friendly celebrations of spring. All these outdoor carnivals, festivals, kite-making and biking events are making me crave ice cream, the beach and the smell of sun block already…

Being a Star Wars fanatic or a comic book geek is pretty cool in my book. And these cool kid-friendly events celebrate and bring out the geek in all of us. A giant black-lit lightsaber battle? What could be cooler than that? A comic book convention just for kids. Let's go!

There's nothing cooler than these geeky activities:

Getting into a preschool in NYC is harder than getting into Harvard. That's the premise of a new documentary about the preschool admissions process in NYC. Nursery University follows six families from different walks of life as they navigate, ruminate and, ultimately, dominate the preschool process.

Nursery University starts by drawing you in to the all too familiar drama of NYC preschool admissions, beautifully capturing every piece of "park bench wisdom" that's ever passed the lips of a distraught NYC parent. Beware: this part of the film made me so sick I almost stopped watching it, about to shrug Nursery University off as yet another piece of media hype feeding the fire of parent's anxiety rather than portraying a real and balanced picture of preschool admissions.

It turns out the directors had me just where they wanted me.