Touring New York City and New Jersey by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Touring New York City and New Jersey by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Madison (Wisconsin) is such a child-friendly city that I was happy to just stay home most of the time and take Florence out and do outings (mini field trips with her).

However, when I had the opportunity to do a cultural vacation in New York City with Florence, I jumped at the chance.  I began to do some research, so we would see a few key artworks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Our hotel was located on the corner of 48^th Street and 8^th Avenue.  The streets in New York run East-West and the avenues run North-South.  We walked along 8^th Avenue when we arrived.

There are lots of little markets with produce proudly displayed out front in New York.  People like to eat well in New York City.  (Italian, Puerto Rican, and South Carolina legacies.)  We walked up to Columbus Circle and walked along Central Park.

We bought some ice cream cones and sat in Central Park eating them.  We returned by walking down Fifth Avenue.

We visited St. Thomas Church, which was splendid.  Nobody was there except for a small group, so we could walk around.

I bought a flyer about the Episcopalian faith.  We left and visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral.  It was packed for mass and had lots of milling tourists as well.  We joined the milling tourists.

Six-year-old Florence and I watched Spanish-language television.  I did not speak any Spanish at the time, but I thought the cockroach ads with operatic death scenes were really funny.

Florence and I watched Plaza Sesamo (Spanish-language Sesame Street).  We learned how to add and subtract in Spanish:

-Uno mas uno son dos.

-Dos menos uno es uno.

Spanish lessons came to an end when we had to take a French tour of town.

For dinner we went to Eddie’s, because I read that New York University students liked to eat there.  It was a good-food-at-a-reasonable-price spot.

When we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I took Florence with me to see two paintings and would then let her play in the museum.

I had a map, and we soon found Velasquez’s Juan de Pareja and El Greco’s Toledo.  (Juan de Parja is the subject of a young teen book entitled I, Juan de Pareja: The Story of a Great Painter and the Slave he Helped Become a Great Artist by Elisabeth Burton de Treviño.)

Both paintings are important for Americans to see.  Juan de Pareja was an African slave dressed up in Renaissance finery as a courtier. (Painters were considered courtier artisans.)  Isabella d’Este of Italy also had African slaves. 

Slaves were dressed nicely to be in the castle and not as farm hands.  The same was true of the American plantations in the South.  (This difference in slave fashion was based on occupation and gave rise to the expression – in the house.)

The city of Toledo was important, because it was a center of learning in Spain for the Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  I explained the paintings to Florence and then went off to play “Magic Room” with her.

I closed my eyes and would let Florence take my hand and lead me from gallery to gallery.  In each new gallery, she would say, “Surprise!”

I would open my eyes and say things like “Wow. This is beautiful.  Tell me what is here.”

Florence would then lead me around showing me flowers, horses, dead birds, graveyards, and pretty people.

We had fun, especially when I made comments such as “That lace looks scratchy” when we looked at the portraits of the Dutch people, who founded New York.  Amsterdam Street is still the main thoroughfare of New York.  The Dutch are still in New York; they own all the Hudson River mansions that are featured in Architectural Digest magazine.

On another day, we went to see the Cloisters on the bus.  Going to places on the bus is one of the best ways to sightsee in a city.

It takes longer, but is more fun to do.  We bought bus passes and used them to go from the World Trade Center (it was still standing then) to the Cloisters.

The Cloisters Museum literally houses sections of medieval French abbeys.  I was gearing up for the post-visit comment-commute with my French in-laws:

“The Americans should really return what’s French to the French…”

To which I had my reply ready:

“Sure, we’ll do that once the French return all the Louvre’s Egyptian antiquities to Egypt, the Mona Lisa and the Raphaels to Italy (the Vatican has room), and all the Near Eastern antiquities to Iraq and Iran.”

We still had not made it to the Cloisters and were enjoying riding through Harlem.  We lived in Wisconsin at the time, and Florence asked, “Why are there so many Black people on the bus.”

I mimicked the Wizard of Oz and said, “We are not in Wisconsin anymore.”

Florence was satisfied with that answer, but the bus was laughing, including me.  Someone said, “Yeah, and Harlem sure as hell ain’t Kansas” and started hee-hawing really loud.

My in-laws asked what was funny.  I had to translate all the cultural subtleties in French, which made the bus riders laugh even more.  Someone even made a comment along the lines of, “Thank God, we have a Mage d’Oz interpreter on board.”

I knew they were making fun of the UN and said, “English, French, and Spanish can get you a six-figure admin or janitor job at the UN, which is union.”

Maybe I am not the angel of Harlem as in the U2 song, but I know my cheap tourism transportation got some well-educated people to add French to their Spanish and obtain decent employment in New York, who might not otherwise have had it.

New York has high educational standards and they do a good job meeting them with multicultural, multilingual, multiracial, multi sexual gender kids, reformed drug addict parents and reformed alcoholics, millionaires, suburbanites, and orphans. 

Maybe the nation should look at what New York State has done right to create highly literate and creative businesspeople with good lawyers despite flawed parenting.

I would like it if all neighborhoods had street cleaning, though, because respiratory diseases do float in the air with bacteria.

On our last day, we took the ferry to New Jersey and ate in a Greek restaurant there.  Florence thought the ferry was great and ran all around looking at all the scenery. She had sea legs in here genes.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting Frank Lloyd Wright Sites in Wisconsin and other Activities with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Frank Lloyd Sites in Wisconsin and others activities with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

I learned to look through the Madison (Wisconsin) newspapers everyday for fun things to do with children in the community.  Many of these activities were free or very inexpensive.

We went to many of these places on a regular basis, including:

Wisconsin Historical Museum

Frank Lloyd Wright Tour

Kids in the Crossroads Performing Arts Programs

Wisconsin Historical Museum

I took Florence to see the Native American exhibit at the Wisconsin Historical Museum, because the Shirley Temple movies she watched had negative stereotypes of Native Americans in them.

The displays have changed in the past twenty years, but I liked the putty figurines that depicted Native American life in Wisconsin by the Wisconsin River.

Florence wanted to play with the figurines.  I wished they sold play sets of the exhibits at the Museum’s gift shop.

Native American tribes differ culturally and linguistically from one another.  In Wisconsin, trading posts were the vehicle of exchange for goods between the French fur traders, who bought pelts for the fashion industry, and the Native Americans, who often bought cognac and dry goods.

The Museum’s website states that fishing, gardening, harvesting wild rice, and maple sugaring were some of the ways to make a living for the Ho-Chunk Nation.

The Ho-Chunk Nation according to their website occupied lands in Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota.  They are known as “people of the sacred language.”

Describing indigenous people and their culture is a different task, because genocide almost wiped the tribes out.

The tribes hid much information about their culture.  A good book to read about hiding culture, but still transmitting it to youth is entitled I, Rigoberta Menchu.  It is the autobiography of the Nobel Prize winner of the same name that was recorded by a French anthropologist.

The trip to the museum was not a cure for the negative stereotyping I saw in the Shirley Temple films, but you need to talk with children about stereotyping over and over to help them deal with people on an individual basis not as a race or ethnicity.

Doing the Architect Frank Lloyd Wright Tour

Frank Lloyd Wright is from Wisconsin, and I wanted Florence to know about him even though she was very young.  The expensive tour of Talisen would not have been appropriate for her age (6).

However, the Taliesen House has a good gift shop with a short documentary about Wright.  Florence wanted to play, but I did manage to show her some pretty houses on the documentary shown in the gift shop.

When we drove up to the house, she said, “That’s the same house that was on TV!”  I told Florence that the man who built the house had aunts who ran an art school.  (My great aunts, who had teaching degrees from UW-Whitewater, babysat those aunts and other Wright and Jones children during summer vacations at our family’s farm.)

We stopped by the Wright houses around Spring Green that are private homes and the bank and golf course (not Wright but fun) that look like a spaceship from the Jetsons cartoon series.

Kids in the Crossroads

Groups that came to perform at the Civic Center in Madison put on free shows in the lobby of the auditorium for children and their parents.  I took Florence to all of them, but had to work one weekend and dad had to do babysitting duty.

I told Laurent that the Ballet Folklorico of Mexico was coming to Madison and asked him to take Florence to the show.

When I came from work, both my husband and Florence were talking to me at once about the “Mexican Ballet.”  My husband said that they had beautiful costumes, did a war dance, and did a dance where one of the performers put her hands in a flame.

Florence said the dancers threw a streamer into the audience.  She caught one of them, which she showed me as she danced around the living room tossing it and re-rolling it. 

My husband worked long hours and on weekends.  I was glad he got to do some fun activities and outings with “kiddo,” too.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Watching Eagles Dive for Food in the Wisconsin River with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Watching Eagles Dive for Food in the Wisconsin River and other activities with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

There were many activities for families to do in Madison (Wisconsin) that you could find out about in the community pages of the local newspapers.  Other communities might like to build and look for similar activities in their communities.  Some more of the fun places that we went to in Madison included:

The Children’s Museum

Viewing Diving Eagles in Praire du Sac (Wisconsin)

Saturday Kid’s Day Out

Madison Children’s Museum

My little family discovered the Madison Children’s Museum with its great dairy exhibit during a New Year’s celebration in downtown Madison.

One of the downtown banks was a sponsor of this event.  On our way to the warm bank’s interior, we met a clown on stilts, who fascinated Florence.  We ate German gingerbread cookies, drank warm cider, and picked up pamphlets on financial products before venturing outside.

We went to see the Capital’s Rotunda and walked around in circles looking up.  I showed Florence her great-great grandfather’s name that is engraved around the dome as one of the soldiers who fought in the Civil War and survived. 

We picked up pamphlets on financial products from the bank on the way out as the East High School Choir sang The Twelve Days of Christmas.

Then, we set out for the Children’s Museum.  They were offering free hayrides outside, but it was cold; our blood had not thickened up for a Wisconsin winter yet.

The first exhibit room we visited at the Children’s Museum was about the ecology of lakes called “Leap into Lakes.”  Florence loved playing with a pinball-like machine that demonstrated what watershed was.

Then, she played inside a model fish and looked upside down at a turtle in a tabletop pond.

We continued on to what I called the Romping Room where Florence ran up and down ramps and under bridges.  She was quite happy there.

We went upstairs where they had exhibits dedicated to the dairy industry.  This was Wisconsin after all.

Florence loved the life-sized models of the cows.  I think she spent two hours pretending to clean them with a brush.  She liked the automatic milking machine, too.

Next to the cows were a model cheese factory and a child-sized soda parlor that children could play in.  Florence served my husband and me meals made of rubber cheese sandwiches and ice cream sandwiches.

We bought family memberships to the Children’s Museum and went there at least once a month.  I had Florence work with art supplies after we visited the Children’s Museum and decorate her bedroom with the artwork.

Viewing Diving Eagles in Praire du Sac (Wisconsin)

We went to Sauk City and Prairie du Sac with Florence to see the bald eagles by Dam Heights Road outside Praire du Sac.  We all liked watching the seagulls and eagles swoop down amidst the fishermen to nab fish.

My husband and Florence walked down to the riverbank where Florence threw some dead fish into the river for the eagles to swoop down at, catch, and eat.

We went to a restaurant with a view on the Wisconsin River, where Florence’s hands were thoroughly washed.  We had grilled chicken sandwiches for lunch.

While we were eating, I told Florence that eagles are the “symbol of the United States.”  I mentioned that fish were below eagles in the River’s food ladder.

Kids’ Day Out

The local newspapers’ community sections in Madison were full of free or inexpensive activities for families to do.

One Saturday morning, my husband took Florence to our neighborhood park where they practiced kicking a soccer ball around.  (The US has a great women’s soccer team.)

When they came home, we set out to see Wayne the Wizard’s Spooky Halloween show.  I was laughing very hard as Wayne kept running around with test tubes that smelled like farts.

Florence finally said, “You’re embarrassing me!” which made me laugh even more.

“Who plans this zany stuff?” I asked myself.

After the show, we drove around the Sherwood Neighborhood to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unitarian Church.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Visiting the House on the Rock and Watching its Room Size Music Boxes Play (Wisconsin) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the House on the Rock and Watching its Room Size Music Boxes Play (Wisconsin) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

There were 3 places that I routinely took 6-year-old Florence to visit in Wisconsin when we lived outside Madison.  University towns like Madison tend to have very nice living conditions for families, especially if you are a faculty member or administrator:

-House on the Rock

-Vilas Park Zoo

-MacKenzie Environmental Center

The House on the Rock

One of my family’s favorite places to go for an outing in Wisconsin was the House on the Rock.

According to Wikipedia (which I trust in this case, because I know who owns the House on the Rock), it was opened in 1959 and was designed by Alex Jordan, Jr.  (Jordon was a relative by marriage to my Wisconsin family.)

I liked visiting the site for its rooms full of music boxes that actually filled sides of walls.  Florence, my husband, and I all liked the Mikado music box with full-sized figures that stealthily moved around the room.

My favorite music box was the Franz Josef that played Viennese waltzes.  We all liked the huge carousel at the end of the exhibit hall with its ponies and red glittering lights.

Vilas Park Zoo

Florence liked playgrounds and the zoo almost as much as seeing the eagles dive for fish in Sauk City (Wisconsin).  The Vilas Park Zoo has been a free entertainment spot in Madison since its inception.  Florence liked the slides and teeter-totters the most in the playground.

Whenever we went to the zoo, I thought of how some people criticize zoos.  However, in many cases, most people would never have the chance to see animals like giraffes.  (I often wonder if people who promote African safaris as the best way to see the animals have stocks in tourism companies.)

Safaris to Africa are very expensive.  I always liked zoos like the one in San Diego as a child.  The San Diego Zoo does try to recreate habitats and promotes reproduction of endangered species.  I think this is a very good policy and kids get to see animals, too.

If it were not for the care that some animals receive in zoos, many species of animals would be extinct like panda bears.

On one of our zoo visits, we learned that there would be a new primate house with real trees for monkeys to play around in with their children.

We had a great time at the Discovery Center.  Florence looked through microscopes and tried to get the attention of fish swimming around the aquarium.

We saw two iguanas that were sleeping.  Florence hid behind me and looked out at them from behind my back.  Fear of the unknown is real.

We stopped to look at penguins on the way out.  I thought the frolicking penguins were Arctic monkeys.

To make our zoo visits more interesting, we would get nonfiction animal books before and after our visit, so we would know about the animals.

I would ask Florence questions like “What do you think they eat?” and “Where do you think they sleep?”

I rarely used grade-level books for zoo visits.  Instead, I used ones for adults.  These had answers to the questions I asked Florence and informative photographs as well.

MacKenzie Environmental Education Center

On one of our visits to the MacKenzie Environmental Center, I made a picnic lunch, which other families might like to make.  None of these items is too hard to make at home and do not cost very much either:

-marinated mushrooms à la grecque

-grilled chicken pasta salad with basil, tomato, and lemon and oil dressing

-four kinds of cheese with bread and butter

-a selection of chopped fruit

-plain yogurt with vanilla bean sugar

-sodas

We passed Sandhill Cranes on our way to the Center.  There is Sandhill Crane Foundation in Wisconsin, but we did not go to it, because there were so many of them to see on the way toward the north in Wisconsin.

We ate in the picnic lunch area at the Center.  They have large picnic areas with clean restrooms, clean barbecue pits, and covered picnic areas in case it rains or is very sunny.

Then, we went down two of the nature trails.  The first one we did was about wildlife and the second one was about ecology.

They had very informative booklets that talked about the plant life and animals. Florence wanted to play hide-and-seek.   That was fun, too.   I would close my eyes, and she would run behind trees as Laurent read the information books.

On another day, when we drove to the MacKenzie Wildlife Center, there were four buffalo lounging by the entryway.

Florence loved the great horned owls we saw.  When we went up to the exhibit, one of the owls hissed at us a few times.  The other owl turned its head around, so that we could see its face attached to its backside.

The owls kept blinking their eyes and moving, which kept Florence interested.  She was so intrigued by these owls that she did not want to spend time looking at the bear cubs there even though she said they were cute.

The animal that Florence really liked was called a fisher.  I had never seen one before taking a look at this one.  It looks like an otter, but it has luxurious chestnut-colored fur.

The one we looked at seemed to want to play with Florence.  Florence said some nice things about the Wildlife Center:

“Let’s just sit and watch.”

“I’m just looking at this pretty animal.”

“Let’s open our own zoo.”

I liked those comments. 

On the way out, I read a few facts about fishers:

-They are porcupine predators.

-They are rare or absent in Sothern Wisconsin.

They were reintroduced to Wisconsin after habitat loss and loss due to trapping.

As we walked on the trail out, we saw two baby deer nursing next to us.  They were speckled deer and very precious.

By Ruth Pennington Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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