From guest blogger Marsha Takeda-Morrison of Sweatpantsmom

I’m familiar with the reactions: the sad eyes, the whining, the frantic efforts to hide in the laundry room. No, I’m not talking about your cat when faced with a vet visit, but your children when you mention that you’ll be taking them to ‘somewhere educational.’

Sure, you’ll get more cheers for Chuck E. Cheese’s, but sometimes it’s nice to take the kids somewhere that teaches them more than how quickly a roll of quarters can disappear when you’re mesmerized by a large waltzing mouse. Here are some of my favorite ‘smart’ destinations in Los Angeles. I’ll bet they’ll forget all about that dancing rodent.

We just went to the newly revamped Griffith Observatory and can’t wait to go back. It had been closed for almost five years for renovations, and was well worth the wait. The new Planetarium Show is amazing and had our kids captivated – you would have thought it was a SpongeBob marathon. The displays are beautiful – a large room with huge planet models overhead and a screen showing a live feed from the space station was my favorite. I have to mention their amazing Café at the End of the Universe – my husband pointed out that I saved my most enthusiastic response for the snack-break portion of our visit. But the Peets coffee, croissants and a killer view made me as happy as seeing a ten-foot glowing model of Mars.

One of my favorite locations is also one of the oldest: The Museum of Natural History in Exposition Park that opened its doors in 1913. I’ve been going there since I was a child, and have been taking my kids there since they were toddlers. Sometimes we take a break from wandering around the animal dioramas, grab a snack and wander the famous Rose Garden for awhile. Next door is the amazing California Science Center, which has free admission and is home to the popular BodyWorks exhibit centered around Tess, a fifty-foot body simulator. Oh, and there’s a McDonalds downstairs, in case the whining starts up and needs to be quieted by a bag of french fries.

Then there’s the KidSpace Museum in Pasadena, which is popular with younger children. I took my 9 and 11-year-olds there recently and found that they had outgrown most of it, although they did still enjoy the regularly scheduled nature shows and hiking around the outdoor gardens. The little ones will love the whimsical hands-on exhibits.

Last but not least I have to mention the beach. Because there’s not one single location in the city that I feel has taught my kids as much. They’ve learned about marine life, birds and the properties of water. It’s led to discussions about homelessness and compassion when we’ve given money to a man asking for help, and the meaning of war when we came upon a memorial to fallen soldiers erected in the sand in Santa Monica. With nothing to distract us we’ve sat on our towels and talked about everything from school bullies to Michelangelo to why we love Jack Black. And the best part? The kids had no idea they’d been ‘learning’ all day long.

What are your favorite ‘smart’ destinations in your city?

[photo: GriffithObservatory.org]

From guest blogger, Marsha Takeda-Morrison, of Sweatpantsmom.

If you happen to stop by my house on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday between 8 and 9:30 and you’re not delivering a pizza, chances are you’ll be left standing at the door. Okay, maybe my husband will answer, but he’ll be under strict orders to get rid of whoever is there as soon as possible. This is because me and my two daughters cannot be disturbed while we’re engaged in that most noble of American pastimes: Heckling the performers on American Idol.

I admit to being completely disinterested at first in the blatherings of Ryan, Randy, Paula and Simon. I managed to avoid any Idol talk at parties and playgroups, proud to be the .0001% of the viewing public that wasn’t part of Idol hysteria. That is until my daughters watched it at their friends’ house, convinced me to tune in one fateful Tuesday night, and got me absolutely, hopelessly hooked.

You know the part where Randy shouts out, “Welcome to Hollywood, dawg”? Well they actually do come to Hollywood, believe it or not. The shows leading up to the finals are taped at CBS Television City, home of legendary shows like the Ed Sullivan Show, All in the Family and Hollywood Squares. More recently the studio has been the location for Dancing With the Stars and Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader. That’s a lot of TV dinners.

If you’re one of the gazillion viewers that would like to attend a taping of AI, you might want to check out OnCameraAudiences.com, a source for tickets to various show tapings. Once you’ve scored your ticket and flown, driven or hitchhiked your way to Hollywood, stop by Swingers Diner which is just down the street from CBS Television City. They have an awesome turkey meatloaf and a cool retro vibe. (Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t the setting for the Vince Vaughn movie “Swingers.” That would be the Hollywood Hills Coffee Shop, located a few miles to the north.)

The finals of American Idol are filmed at the Kodak Theater, home of the Oscars. I attended an industry awards show at the Kodak a few years back, and have to confess that one of the most thrilling things was going to the ladies restroom. I couldn’t help but think, “Angelina Jolie might have sat in this very spot!” But even if you don’t make it into the theater, the surrounding Hollywood and Highland Center is worthy of a day trip. It’s a massive complex with shops, restaurants and clubs, and great for people watching. We like to take the kids to the Lucky Strike Lanes bowling alley, which is bowling at its most high-tech and luxurious. (More useless trivia: Brandon Routh from “Superman Returns” was a bartender here.) The complex also has one of those dying relics: an actual brick and mortar record store. You’ll find the Virgin Records Megastore on the ground floor if you ever decide to take a break from downloading your favorite AI tunes and buy one of those round, shiny things. What were they called? Oh yeah, CDs.

Who do you think will be the next American Idol? (Sorry, I won’t be answering comments on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday between 8 and 9:30.)

From guest blogger, Andrea Widburg, of Andi’s Answers

Have you ever been to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York? It is, in my opinion, the best museum New York has to offer. All the other New York museums — the Met, Frick, Museum of Natural History, MOMA, etc. — are sort of generic. By that, I mean that, while they’re great museums, you can find their like in every major world city. The Tenement Museum, however, is something entirely different, since it’s a time capsule of a unique moment in American immigrant history.

The museum occupies an old tenement in the Lower East Side that was built in 1867 and that was continuously inhabited through the early 1930s. It was then sealed up, where it remained as an unlikely time capsule to be explored decades later.

New York’s Lower East Side, of course, is the first neighborhood through which the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe streamed at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. During the museum’s heyday, when it was a functioning tenement building, the Lower East Side was more densely packed than Calcutta.

The museum is a staggering testament to the human ability to adapt and survive. Each apartment in the building is roughly the shape and size of a full size school bus (although slightly shorter and wider). The apartments were divided into three parts: a front room, a kitchen, and a back bedroom. As originally built, only the front rooms had windows. In the 1890s, however, the building was remodeled to add a cut-out between the kitchen and the front room, to allow some natural light into the kitchen. The back bedroom had no natural light at all.

What’s almost inconceivable is that these teeny, dark apartments usually housed an average family of six or eight people. Indeed, if the family was really strapped, the six or eight family members would live and sleep in the two front rooms, with a paying lodger getting the privacy of the back bedroom. During the day, while the kids were at school (or, often, working) the same apartments would be used as sweat shops where up to twelve people would cram into the two front rooms to make clothes.

There were four units to a floor. When the building was first build, there was no plumbing, although a single toilet was eventually added on each floor. In other words, during a busy work day, one could have a potential daily toilet load of forty-eight people per floor.

When we visited the museum, it was your average hot New York summer day, with the temperature around 92 degrees and the humidity correspondingly high. The building’s interior was sweltering, and the kids, comfortably attired in shorts and t-shirts, instantly set up a round of complaining about how hot they were. They fell silent, though, when they learned that the building’s original tenants would have been wearing the neck to ankle clothes of times’ past, and that they would not even have had the benefit of the rickety fan the museum had installed to provide some cross-ventilation for weary visitors.

I’ve been to so many museums in America and Europe, including a broad variety of wonderful, non-traditional museums. None has ever struck me the way this one did. Although the rooms are oppressive and depressing, they are also a stirring testament to the hearty spirit of those who came to this country. These immigrants managed, not only to live under such conditions, but to do well enough economically that their children did not have to repeat the experience. I know this because census data shows that, almost without exception, the children who grew up in these slums managed to move to the suburbs and to take their parents with them. Whether these immigrants were Russian, Polish or Italian, Jewish, Protestant or Catholic, they catapulted themselves out of these appalling circumstances and went on to live the American dream. It was, therefore, a very inspiring day’s visit for our whole family.

SFMOMA from Martin Luther King Memorial

San Francisco has many wonderful museums, some within walking distance of each other. The mother of them all is the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), a architecturally fascinating building across from Yerba Buena Gardens. Interestingly enough, my kids enjoy the building almost more than the exhibits. Last time we went, we spent a long time on the suspension bridge on the 4th floor, running back and forth, looking down to the lobby below.

Around the corner, on Howard Street, is the California Academy of Sciences in temporary digs while their Golden Gate Park home is being retrofitted. The Steinhardt Aquarium is fascinating all by itself, but my 5 year old thinks the Nature Nest was created just for her!

Across town, near the Palace of Fine Arts, is probably our favorite family adventure in San Francisco, the Exploratorium. We can go and spend the entire day here! My favorite has always been the cow eyeball dissecting exhibit. When the kids were little, I could hardly pull them away from the giant bubble maker; nowadays, my son is fascinated with the science of sports, especially skateboarding, while my daughter likes to spend all her time in the tactile dome. As I said, an entire day’s worth of activities!

Photo courtesy of David Paul Ohmer.