Or Blogs

Summer is almost here and South Florida is offering up her many treasures. There are many reasons to take a staycation – a local vacation.

Cheaper

If you’re staying in town and going to local exhibits, beaches, and museums, you’re saving money. Out of town hotels can be expensive and the average week-long hotel bill – whether for couples or for families – can be much more than people currently want to spend. That money can be saved and used for local enjoyment. Plus, with the price of gas on the rise, vacationers may want to skip the long road trips and relax with fun that’s a little closer to home.

Local Adventures

I’ve lived in South Florida for most of my adult life, and until recently, I never made it to the beach even though it takes me only fifteen minutes to get to one. In fact, one of the good things about saving money on a staycation is that suddenly the place where you live becomes new and exciting and interesting. With just a little research (and we’re taking care of that part for you!), you can find everything in your own backyard. Why not grab a camera and document your local adventure? Enjoy creating unique day trips made up of Florida’s exciting experiences.

Romance

From romantic bed and breakfasts like the Desoto or romantic day trips to Villa Viscaya or the magical allure of the Coral Castle, there’s plenty to do in Dade or Broward counties. A stroll along Hollywood Beach’s famous 2.5 mile broadwalk or a night out on romantic Las Olas Riverfront are popular ideas for cozy couples.

Fun for Kids

South Florida offers many fun things for kids to do. The kids can build sandcastles on the beach or learn about marine life through South Florida museums such as the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale and the Miami Science Museum, which also offers a summer camp. Florida also offers a variety of parks and playgrounds for little ones.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By heather0714

Spielberg’s Jaws kept moviegoers out of the ocean in 1975. That may have been the start of the shark as pop culture monster, but the new SHARK exhibit at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art shows many sides to this fascinating – and terrifying – creature. It gives South Floridians one more reason to take advantage of all that’s in our own backyard as part of a summer ‘staycation.’

This exhibit is varied, interesting, fun, and great for adventurous kids and curious adults.

Our Endless Fascination with Sharks

This multi-media exhibit is guest curated by world famous marine artist Richard Ellis. MOAFL’s latest showcase is presented in conjunction with Nova Southeastern University’s Oceanographic Center. If you enjoy Shark Week or Deadliest Catch, then you’ll love this thrilling collection.

Paintings by Guy Harvey and Others

This event is family-friendly, so bring your kids along for this multi-media adventure. A free app is available via the MOAFL website so that the audience can experience the exhibit before ever going. Famous marine artists such as Guy Harvey and Robert Longo are featured in this exhibition. Also on display are wildlife illustrator Marc Dando’s watercolors. These renowned artists depict the many different species of sharks, including angel sharks, sleeper sharks, and tiger sharks.

Jaws Gallery

Of course, no shark exhibition would be complete without referencing Steven Spielberg’s classic 1975 film Jaws. Original storyboards, film memorabilia, and posters are included in the Jaws gallery and several paintings were donated to the SHARK exhibit by Peter Benchley, the author of the original Jaws novel.

Kids and Conservation Efforts

Nature loving kids will enjoy this exhibit. Also fun for kids and adults are the museum’s shark education stations. Parts of the exhibition also focus on recent advances in shark conservation efforts, as this fearsome fish is rapidly becoming one of the earth’s most vulnerable animals.

If You Go

The Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art is located at 1 East Las Olas Boulevard in the heart of downtown Fort Lauderdale. For more information about this exhibition, please visit their website or call 954-525-5500. Adults are $10; seniors and military is $7; kids 5 and under are free and kids from 6-17 are only $5.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By Andy Jien

Dan Savage’s brainchild, the It Gets Better project, has a special place in my consciousness. Whenever I think back to my own high school experience, or the experiences of my gay friends when they were teens, I feel so blessed and grateful to be in a time of change –as the dialogue slowly shifts from silence and fear to hope and acceptance. Even though there is still a long way to go, Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project has brought national awareness to what was once a silent and terrible epidemic of gay bullying. Dan Savage has started an LGBT media revolution for this generation, and after such an overwhelming explosion of hope, there’s no going back into the national closet.

Hate to Hope

Savage’s It Gets Better project website is a treasure trove of information and hope for LGBT youth, many of whom have not only been bullied, but may be suicidal. According to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, an estimated 20 to 40 % of America’s 1.6 million homeless youth are LGBT because 26% of LGBT kids are kicked out of their homes when they come out to family members. While the It Gets Better project’s main focus is providing hope and not housing, there is no doubt that the IGBP is an important resource in challenging homophobia.

From High School Kids to The President

The message of the It Gets Better project is simple: live, make it through, and life will improve. To date, there are over 40,000 It Gets Better videos that have been viewed millions of times. The best part of this visual mosaic of hope is that everyone has made the videos. People from all walks of life have made an IGBP video – from high school jocks and middle school lesbians all the way to celebs like Lady Gaga and even President Obama.

Learn More

Kids who need help or support can call a toll-free confidential hotline at 866-4-U-TREVOR. To learn more about the It Gets Better project, to donate, or to contribute or view the videos, go here.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By soundfromwayout

Let your inner explorer out to play with these fun and local South Florida activities.

The Museum of Discovery and Science

Locals know the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Discovery and Science by the 52-foot-tall Great Gravity Clock, which stands in front of the museum. The Museum of Discovery and Science is home to many fantastic exhibits. True, while parts of the museum are geared to children, curious and young at heart adults will also enjoy the many things to see and experience, including the brand new EcoDiscovery Center, which features the Everglades Airboat Adventure and an otter exhibit. The Museum of Discovery and Science is also home to the biggest movie screen in South Florida, the Autonation Imax, a 300-seat, surround-sound theater with a screen that’s five stories high. For more information about the Museum of Discovery and Science, please go here. Adult admission is $13; Senior admission is $12; children from 2-12 are $11.

The Buehler Planetarium and Observatory

Tucked away on the Broward College main campus (formerly the Broward Community College main campus) in Davie, the Buehler Planetarium offers patrons a unique chance to gaze upon the night skies from one of the most advanced planetariums in South Florida. Experience the skies for free on observation nights, which are Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday from 8 to 10 pm. The planetarium also offers a variety of shows, from musical shows to story time for kids. Most of the planetarium events are extremely affordable. To learn more about the Buehler Planetarium, go here or call 954-201-6681.

South Florida Amateur Astronomers’ Association at Markham Park

Every Saturday from dusk to midnight, the South Florida Amateur Astronomers’ Association opens Markham Park’s observatory for an evening of stargazing. Founded in 1965 and incorporated in Florida one year later, the SFAAA makes its home inside Markham Park in Sunrise. This free event is a perfect way to spend an evening. All are welcome and its perfect for the curious. For more information, call 954-384-0442 or visit the South Florida’s Amateur Astronomers’ Association here.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By osseous

The 42nd Annual Earth Day is almost here! Get ready for some fun family celebrations during the weekend of April 21. Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson founded Earth Day in 1970 at a time of extreme over-consumption. What began 42 years ago as a grassroots celebration has now become an internationally recognized day to honor the environment. Earth Day has become instrumental in many laws, including the passage of the Clean Air Act.

Celebrate sustainability and nature with two local festivals. They’re both on the same day, and both promise to be a blast. Why not be a green party animal and go to both festivals?

Hugh Taylor Birch State Park : Make Earth Day Every Day!

The first Earth Day festival is at Hugh Taylor Birch State Park on Saturday, April 21 from 10 am to 5pm. Be sure to bring little ones for this celebration. They’ll be activities offered for kids by organizations such as the Girl Scouts of America, Trash to Treasure, Camp Live Oak, the fantastic Kids’ Ecology Corps, and Lori’s Beakers and Bugs Company. For adults, they’ll be chances to volunteer (including a sea turtle rescue), ecology-focused workshops, organic and vegan food, and live music. Activities will also include free giveaways and live entertainment, including a drum circle.

Marando Farms: Earth Day Celebration

Come out to Fort Lauderdale’s Marando Farms on Saturday, April 21 from 10am to 2 pm. Kids can enjoy face painting and a bounce house. Adults will enjoy the many varieties of organic food available. There will also be live music and a guest speaker from GMO Free Florida, Trish Sheldon.

If You Go

The Hugh Taylor Birch State Park Make Earth Day Every Day celebration is located at 3109 East Sunrise Blvd in Fort Lauderdale. Go here for more information.

The Earth Day Celebration at Marando Farms is located at 1401 Southwest 1st Ave in Fort Lauderdale. Call Marando Farms at 954-294-2331 or go here.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By dougww

Earth Day officially began on April 22, 1970 and was founded by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. I urge you to take advantage of the fact that Earth Day falls on a Sunday this year – go out and celebrate it, don’t just hear about it second-hand.

My first memory of an Earth Day celebration was in 1990. I was eleven and I was running wild with some friends on the Ridge, a patch of land in-between Pine Island Road and Nob Hill Road in Plantation, Florida. All I remember of that day is a lot of talks about recycling and soda cans. I stacked old soda cans and then my friends and I excitedly put them into big red bins marked for that purpose. There were balloons. My cousin rolled down a hill, narrowly missing an anthill, but this was just another excuse for the sweaty, curious lot of us to poke at some insects. Not bad for a first earth day: soda, tin cans, and a lot of bugs.

When I was growing up, a best friend of mine lived in walking distance from the Ridge, and we’d go there all the time. We didn’t care about what danger might exist. All that mattered for us was to be free in nature. We’d stay in the woods so long that her parents yelled themselves hoarse trying to get us to come inside. But we – especially I – couldn’t be distracted. Light changes in the woods, blazing forth when you walk out of a cluster of trees. Those times represented freedom and joy, independence and adventure. I wish everyone that feeling at least once in their lives, especially the kids of today, who are growing up in a world where technology may one day entirely eclipse the natural world. Let’s make it up to us – and use this Earth Day to renew our commitment to protecting the environment.

Here are some things to do on Earth Day.

Picnic

Make the kids turn off their electronic devices and go on a picnic. Enjoy being outside.

Pretend to be Ansel Adams

Got junior explorers? Feel like being an explorer yourself? Pay attention to what’s around you. Take pictures of bugs and of the natural world.

Take the Time

Find a local celebration or simply make the time to go for a walk. Make this a perfect time to celebrate the value of the present and our hopes for the future.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By ax2groin

I’ve heard it everywhere. And every time I hear someone say this, I want to make myself an “LGBT RIGHTS” cape and burst forth from my hiding place, yelling like a banshee.

“That’s so gay.”

I heard it last week in – of all places – a bookstore. One teen turned to another and said, very loudly “DUDE, THAT’S SO GAY.” The kids, barely seventeen and joshing each other over a nearby stand of Harry Potter books, weren’t saying “gay” as a good thing. When someone uses gay like that, the meaning is clear. Gay is gross. Gay is icky. Gay is something to be hidden.

Words are Powerful…Especially to Teens

All of us are role models, period. When your kids hear you decrying people in the LGBT community, when your kid hears you say that gay marriage is worth less than straight marriage, that the families of gay, lesbian, bi, or trans couples are worth less than straight families, that the legal rights of straights matter more, then you’re ignoring a chance to teach them an important lesson about basic equality and kindness.

Here’s the thing, though. There’s enough homophobia out there that maybe those kids from the bookstore had a gay uncle or brother or mom, and maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe they picked it up from the tons of negative homophobic messages that teens receive every day.

Erasing the Word Won’t Make LGBT Folks Go Away

Words matter. Words can scare or scar, hurt or wound. But they can also heal and transform. Words are one of our strongest weapons as we set out to create a world with equal rights. And we’re getting there a little bit more, day by day. DADT is now a thing of the past and last week, a military base in Afghanistan raised a pride flag. That’s amazing to me. Millions of words from millions of people accomplished that victory.

The Word War Continues

What’s not amazing is the ongoing war over the word “gay”. Last December, the word “gay” was removed from a Christmas carol and then put back once parents protested. The infamous “Don’t Say Gay” Bill from Tennesee is still clogging up the inner workings of the House Education Subcommittee, despite the fact that many school counselors feel that it could lead to the suicide of more students. Heck, it’s even making Tennessee Governor, Republican Bill Haslam roll his eyes.
So, what’s the answer to all this anti-gay verbal nonsense? We can’t stop talking, any of us, about what matters. We can’t allow ourselves to be silenced. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to teenagers who are only starting to peek around the closet door.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By infomatique

When I was a kid, Saturdays in summer meant that it was time to pick strawberries. It meant piling in the car -sometimes with my two cousins – and heading over to Batten’s Farm, located in Davie, Florida. That was in 1992.

Several years ago, Batten’s Farm  closed and it seemed like all the locals went into kind of low-grade mourning.

Goodbye to Berries

One friend of mine actually called me to report that she’d bought strawberries at a regular supermarket. “Nothing like Batten’s,” she sighed into the phone, recounting happy memories of Batten’s strawberries and milkshakes. While I didn’t get misty eyed over store-bought berries, I too found myself getting nostalgic whenever I drove south on Davie Road and passed the old farmstead, the small building shut up tighter than a drum, its white shutters gleaming in the sunlight. With it went the ripe, better-than-in-a-food-store strawberries, the friendly owners, and the barnyard animals in the pen out back. Worst of all? The milkshakes and boiled peanuts that I used to share with my late father were gone too.

Batten’s Reopened in 2011

And last summer, it reopened, thanks in part to the Davie-based non-profit, the North-South Institute, which operates Batten’s as a farmer’s market, with local Broward County farmers selling produce.

Recently, I went to Batten’s and had just as much fun there now as I did when I was a kid.

A New Generation of Local Food and Fun

Some things have changed. The new owners have installed ceiling fans in the building and there’s now a refrigerated section in the back for sodas, boxed foods, and of course, their famous and beloved strawberries.

The milkshakes are back too, just in time for spring.

But the best thing of all? The promise of hanging out for an hour – or all day if I wanted to – slurping a coconut milkshake and hanging out with the barnyard animals. Batten’s is perfect for kids or for a solo walk around the small farm.

If You Go

Batten’s Farm is located at 5151 Davie Road, Davie, 33329. Visit their website, call 954-990-7820, or find them on Facebook.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By tamburix

When I was a teenager in high school, I had a copy of a book called Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian, a literary anthology edited by Bennett Singer. It was my first glimpse into a world where I could see images of myself and other people like me. I still have it – it’s worn, written in, and destroyed. The spine is bent. The pages are folded. I have vivid memories of carrying it in my high school backpack, terrified that someone would notice the cover and I’d be outed.

Things have changed since I was sixteen, thank God.

With the awareness surrounding Glee and movements like the It Gets Better Project, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered youth are starting to get the respect they deserve. But there’s still a long way to go. Anti-gay language is constant. How often have we heard “That’s so gay” to describe something that’s hated? Even though Tennessee lawmakers are stalling, it may soon become illegal to say the word “gay” or discuss any topics on homosexuality in the Tennessee public school system, an issue which school counselors fear may lead to more bullying, silence, and potential suicides.

But if 15-year-old Amelia Roskin-Franzee has anything to say about it, gay books will be in the hands of the kids who need support. Her charity, the Make It Safe Project, is out to change the world, one book at a time.

About Make It Safe

Make It Safe is a charity dedicated to putting LGBT books into the hands of students and homeless kids by donating age appropriate LGBT books to schools and homeless shelters (over 80% of teen runaways are LGBT).
Reading about yourself can raise your self-esteem. It makes you feel like you’re worth something, not a second-class citizen. Books and stories matter because through them, we learn about our worth, our dreams, and our uniqueness. We learn that we’re not alone, and that our stories matter.

“One book can save a life,” reads the main page for the Make It Safe Project, and I couldn’t agree more, especially if gay teens are living in rural or conservative areas where books with LGBT themes are often removed from libraries and gay characters are rarely included in the English curriculum. The site also provides a wealth of information about starting a GSA (Gay Student Organization) on campus.

How to Donate

To donate to Make It Safe, please go here.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By Skokie Public Library

You’re on vacation! You’re in an airplane or in a moving car and your little bundle of love needs a diaper change. Time to pull out diapers made of cloth, which you’ll have to wash later.

Oooh! Everything about that just sounds like fodder for a bad vacation movie.

My good friend who I consider an “eco-mommy” is always trying to find new ways to introduce green products into her kids’ lives. When she and her small family travel, she confessed to me that diapers are the one thing that never seem to go green in her family, especially when the family heads off on vacation.

But whether you decide on reusable or disposable diapers, almost anything is better for the earth than a traditional diaper.

Dirty (Traditional) Diaper Facts

It can take up to 500 years for one diaper to decompose, according to the EPA. Now imagine how many thousands of diapers most parents go through in one year? Disposable diapers make up a solid 5% of landfill waste and can cost several thousands of dollars from baby’s first diaper to potty training.

Cloth Facts for Traveling Parents

Simply put, cloth diapers can be reused. For this reason, cloth diapers may not be the most convenient option for parents on vacation. Most diaper services use non-green products to clean the diapers, and that may not be something green parents are comfortable with. As a result, you may have to figure out how much time you have to wash diapers. However, pro-cloth parents say that there are many green positives to cloth diapers. You’ll save a great deal of your own green by switching to cloth. Plus, most babies who are in cloth diapers seldom if ever get diaper rash, and cloth-diaper parents might have to use less cloth diapers in the first place, because babies can feel when they’ve wet themselves a little more acutely than if they were wearing traditional diapers. Due to the reality of cleaning cloth diapers, this option may not be the best for the family who’s traveling, although when you get back home feel free to check out all the great items at TinyTush.com, including these disposable diaper liners.

The Alternative

For families who want the convenience of a disposable diaper, check out earth-friendly brands, such as Seventh Generation , which has no petroleum-based lotions, fragrances, or latex. All that’s good and green for baby, but the fact is that most disposable diapers are not totally biodegradable. For more info, check out this fantastic disposable “green” diaper chart.
Disposable diapers may be flat-out easier to pack when you’re off to grandma’s or on a cross-country jaunt, but when you return home (and if you’re up for the time it will take), cloth diapers may be worth a try.

By Marissa Cohen

Photo By majorbonnet