With Easter coming up, stocking up on candy is on our minds. Oh who are we kidding? Sweets are always on our minds, especially ours kids'.

While there are fabulous candy stores throughout the five boroughs, if you're looking for NYC's absolute sweetest spot, it's got to be Bleecker Street in the West Village. Within an eight-block span, you'll find four different high-end candy stores, each with its own unique flavor and look.

Recently, my family and I decided to sugar rush to all of them in one afternoon! (We're fearless like that.) Here's what we found on our Bleecker Street candy crawl:

Creating a homemade, natural Easter Egg dye out of ingredient in the fridge has always appealed to me and my son as a fun kitchen experiment, giving us the chance to play mad scientists for a while. You can make the dye from any fruit or vegetable that when boiled leeches its color into the water. My son and I used kale, blueberries, cranberries, beets, a mixture of carrot peels and onion skins and turmeric for cool, unusually colored Easter Eggs in an earthy color palette.  These eggs really stand out from the neon colored tie dyed Easter Eggs we usually make.

Our spring culture coverage continues with a look at the most promising family shows opening this season. While Disney's brand-new Broadway spectacle Aladdin may be getting all the press, there are lots of fantastic kids' shows bowing Off Broadway with much lower ticket prices.

There are options for all age groups, including a few shows that are perfect for first-time theatergoers. From page-to-stage adaptations of popular children's books like We're Going on a Bear Hunt, Junie B. Jones and Mr. Chickee's Funny Money, to original shows about Einstein and the Earth, to interactive theater experiences where families can get in on the action, it sounds like an exciting spring season. Plus the New York Children's Theater Festival returns for its third year on the Upper West Side.

The one thing all of these shows have in common? You can take the kids to see them without dipping into their college funds—most of our recommendations are $20 or less.

We've been raving about the cool robot-making workshops for kids at Brooklyn Robot Foundry ever since we discovered the program at Maker Faire in 2011. Apparently we're not alone: Its original Gowanus storefront has been such a hit with families, the owner, mechanical engineer and local mom, Jenny Young, decided to open a second location in Tribeca. Just like the Brooklyn outpost, the Manhattan studio offers hands-on sessions where kids learn how to build one-of-a-kind mechanical creations out of wires, circuits and everyday items like boxes, brushes and tin cans—not a prefab Lego Mindstorms or WeDo kit in sight.

Last weekend, my 10-year-old son (a robot-making novice) and I went to check out the brand-new Brooklyn Robot Foundry Tribeca, located in a refurbished industrial space on Canal Street just a block from Hudson River Park. As we approached, he asked, "If I make a robot to take over the world, do you think it'll turn on me?" Clearly he was very excited about our visit. I'm happy to report that, while his custom-made creation can't dominate mankind, it's still pretty awesome (and useful, too).

Yesterday we posted an easy way to decorate Easter eggs without a big mess. Today we've got another one:

The first time my now 9-year old son decorated Easter Eggs he couldn't manage to retrieve them from the dye using the little metal dipper that came in the packaged egg dyeing kits. Against my mother's advice, I let him scoop the eggs out of the liquid color with his fingers. Resulting in a basketful of lovely eggs for Easter and a toddler with dye stained hands for two weeks.

The following year we tried this easy tie dye method using a colander and regular old food coloring. The technique is fun, quick and simple enough for a toddler to achieve incredible looking eggs without having to submerge them in messy liquid dye. We still decorate our Easter Eggs this way even though my son mastered the egg dipper a long time ago.