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What a difference 8 years make! The photo on the left is from our 2003 stay in Boston; on the right see our 2011 recreation of that special moment. Next week I’ll share our story of walking the Freedom Trail (this photo comes right in the middle), including a separate post about visiting the Old South Meeting House, which was one of our favorite places along the path. I’ll finish up our Boston trip by writing about the New England Aquarium.

For Photo Friday at Delicious Baby.

I have always liked history, and as fortune would have it, I married a man who shares that interest. Maybe it’s because I enjoy stories, but to me there’s something so amazing in the idea that at every point in recorded time ordinary people have been going about their day-to-day business with the same kinds of concerns that we have today. And I’m fairly ecumenical in my tastes – want to share the history of the ball bearing? The pencil? Cheese? I’m all eyes and ears.

But just because I’m a sucker for pretty much any kind of diorama, interactive display, or museum panel doesn’t mean I assume my children will enjoy them equally. I’m lucky that both of my boys like history too, but I know that making sure they continue to do so is part of my job as a traveling mom. If we keep having fun at museums and historic sites, they’ll keep wanting to visit them.

So what are my top tips for making historical attractions interesting for children?

1. Read, read, and read some more. Before we even leave home I make sure that we’ve read up on the place we’re visiting and understand its historical significance. When my children were younger, this might have meant me reading books to them or finding art or history books with lots of pictures that I could share and discuss. Now that they are independent readers, I visit the library and find age-appropriate books for them and then just leave these lying around to be discovered. Series I love include the “Horrible Histories” and “You Wouldn’t Want to Be a…” both of which take a humorous and engaging approach to teaching about history.

2. Take a tour. A good guide can do a lot to breathe life into a historic site or museum and many now offer tours especially aimed at families. The best thing about tours and kids is that sometimes they can be a great way to combine historic information with exercise, as when we rode through Central London with a guide via Fat Tire Bike tours. There’s no better way to keep children interested than to keep them moving!

3. Make connections. Visiting an old school house? Talk about the similarities and differences between it and your child’s classroom. At Hagley last spring, we played “I Spy” in the kitchen of a historic house – I asked the boys to find the antique equivalents of things that we have at home. At the Globe Theatre in London, we talked about how different seeing a play there would be from going to the movies. Another tack is to connect what you’re looking at to things your children have learned at school or to other places you’ve visited.

4. Encourage questions. This may seem obvious, but I can’t tell you how often I’ve been in a museum or at a historic site and overheard families where kids ask questions only to have the adults simply respond “I don’t know.” When your child asks what an item is or how it was used, find someone who can give you the answer, even if it takes a little doing. Most museums now have docents or interpreters throughout who will be more than happy to help you get the information you need. We’ve done this so often that my children will often seek out docents themselves to ask questions.

5. Dress up. This last tip won’t work for every child or in every situation, but one of the most successful experiences we had in historic immersion was at Colonial Williamsburg where we rented a costume for Teddy. He absolutely loved wearing the blouse, rucksack, and hat (we purchased the latter and he very carefully chose a cockade with which to decorate it) and I think it made the entire experience more vivid for him. It helped that the interpreters there continually addressed him in character – expecting him to bow in return and doff his hat – and that he was invited to participate in both seed planting and a muster as if he were an 18^th-century child. I think the takeaway here is that meaningful interactivity and immersion – whether it involves dressing up or not – is the way to go.

Thus far we’ve managed to have very positive experiences at a whole host of different historic sites from the Tower of London to Versailles to the small museum in Milton, Wisconsin. I’ll be honest and confess that I do worry about a bit about what will happen when my children get older and reach that eye-rolling stage when everything is boring. But until then I’m going to enjoy every historical moment.

These are my top tips for engaging kids with history on the road. Now it’s your turn. What are your favorite suggestions?

Trident Booksellers and Café in Boston met all of my expectations and then some. For one thing, I love the ambiance. On one side there’s a bustling counter with a bunch of booths and a long communal table at the back.

On the other, well, there’s this:

A carefully curated selection of books and magazines. So carefully curated, in fact, that the people who choose and sell them have their own bios on Trident’s staff page (one of them contains the word absquatulated – I’m not sure whether that’s a selling point or not).

But back to the food. As I mentioned, it met all my requirements, particularly with regards to portion size. The boys started out their meals with Mango Tango smoothies, containing mango, orange juice, honey, and vanilla ice cream. Finally! We found a place where we can ice cream and bacon at the same meal!

I ordered the Eggs Benedict with avocado. I think I may still have some leftovers tucked away somewhere.

And Matt had the elegantly named Potato Chuckwagon.

I know this looks innocent, but under those fried eggs lies a mass of shredded potato, cheddar cheese, chorizo, onions, and peppers.

The Trident is a busy place, especially on weekends when you may have to wait for a table – although of course there are all those books to browse through while you wait. We lucked out and got to sit down right away on a Saturday morning in July. The service was friendly and efficient but not rushed and our server remembered to bring Tommy the side of whipped cream he asked for to accompany his dainty meal of pancakes, eggs, homefries, toast, and bacon.

(I no longer remember why my child asked for a side of whipped cream or why I permitted him to get a side of whipped cream when he also had a smoothie with ice cream in it. Maybe he hit me over the head with a book and I was unconscious when he ordered.)

Trident Booksellers is located at the far end of Newbury Street from downtown Boston toward Boston University. It was supremely hot the day we ate there, so we chose to hop back on the T for one more stop instead of walking to Fenway Park, which lies just a little further out. On a nicer day, this would be an easy walk. You could also easily stroll back up Newbury Street (although beware – much expensive consumer temptation will line your way) to visit the Boston Public Library, the Swan Boats, or the Common. The Esplanade along the Charles River is close by, as is the Museum of Fine Arts and the meandering Fens, a gorgeous green space to get lost in (if you’re there in early summer, be sure to make your way over to the rose garden). Trident is therefore the perfect place to fill up before setting out to burn off some energy in the Back Bay. Or stop by for dinner (or “perpetual breakfast”) at the end of a busy day – they are open every day from 8 a.m. until midnight. The menu is extensive, with something to please everyone, and they do serve beer and wine if your day happens to have been a bit wearying.

For Wanderfood Wednesday at Wanderlust and Lipstick – stop by for some more lip-smacking posts.

Tommy inherited my father’s name, his long legs, and his passion for baseball, and although the Phillies rule the airways at our house, when we visited Boston a trip to Fenway seemed an appropriate homage. I wanted to get tickets for a game, but balked at the exorbitant price tag: Before buying any food or drink, I would have had to drop a cool $400 for nosebleed seats. How different from my childhood, when anyone could get tickets; I remember long, and to me excruciatingly boring, hours at Fenway – hours wasted on a child with no appreciation for the sport’s poetry or the history of the stadium. Hot hours spent counting empty seats. But now those seats are full. In fact every single game has sold out since 2003.

Since seeing a game wasn’t feasible, I was happy to learn that anyone can tour Fenway. In fact, I’d call this a must-see for any baseball fan with an interest in the game’s history, since the park is the oldest one in the league that’s still in use. It’s also one of the smallest stadiums still in use, making it an accessible and intimate place to learn about the Red Sox and indeed about Boston itself.

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Tour start at the Team Store on Yawkey Way across from the stadium. The guide quickly susses out what teams visitors root for (in our case it was obvious; Tommy was clad, per usual, in his full Phillies regalia). However, unless you’re a Yankees fan, you’re fairly safe from abuse. But if the Yankees are your favorite team, be prepared for repeated and (relatively) good-nature ribbing throughout the tour.

We started in the wooden Grandstand seats I remembered so well from my own childhood. You’re there for a while because a professional photographer captures each group as they enter; the photos are sold as souvenirs at the end of the tour. Here we started to learn the history of the team and the park, how it was named for the neighborhood in which it was built, how when it opened in 1912 the left- and right-field bleachers weren’t yet complete, how a fire that destroyed those wooden left-field bleachers in 1926 led ultimately to the extension of the Grandstand where we were sitting as well as the concrete wall, how the scoreboard – still changed by hand from behind the wall – was installed in 1934. We learned about this shrine’s Holy Trinity of Ruth, Robinson, and Williams. (Although perhaps a comparison to Judas is more apt when mentioning Babe Ruth.)

Other tour highlights include a visit to the top of that concrete wall, which since 1947 has been painted to match the rest of the stadium and is now famously called the Green Monster. We perched in the seats that in recent years were placed on the top of this most famous cliff in baseball, the bane of so many fielders. Everything in Fenway seems to have a name, a story, a legend, a myth – even the foul poles. The one atop the Green Monster is named for Carlton Fisk, whose 1975 World Series home run forced a seventh game against the Reds (which the Sox famously, painfully, lost).

The Lone Red seat in the right field bleachers is visible from various points in the tour. It marks the spot where in 1946 Ted Williams hit the longest home run ever recorded at Fenway. From the opposite side of the field it seems impossibly far, and one can only imagine how it felt to be the man sitting in that seat, hit on the head with what surely was the most famous ball ever struck, and not even getting to go home with it.

We ended the tour watching the Mariners warm up before that evening’s game. The players pitched and batted and stretched, the air shimmered with heat, the wooden seats sat expectant and empty, the famous Citgo sign overlooked all. Closing my eyes to the satisfying ring of balls connecting with bats I could almost hear the cadence of the announcers, weaving a summer story that my father never tired of.

On a chilly January morning, it’s easy to forget how oppressively hot it was during our first night in Boston in the summer of 2011. It didn’t help that the air conditioning was broken in Giacomo’s, the North End restaurant where we had dinner (since it is an old favorite of Matt’s and mine, we toughed it out). Happily, on our walk back to the hotel, I was able to set the boys loose in the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway, which stretches like a necklace of parks from Chinatown to the North End sitting miraculously on the site of what was once an elevated highway. Serendipitous moments like these are among my favorite reasons to travel with kids.

Are you considering a spring break or summer family vacation in Boston? If so, I hope you’ll return next week because I’ll be finishing up the story of our trip there last year – I realized recently that I really only got about halfway through the things we saw and did.

For Photo Friday at Delicious Baby.

In the comments from last week’s family travel question, where I talked about our spring travel plans, I was asked how I managed to get away so often with two school-aged children. The answer is somewhat complicated, because while I do respect the fact that classroom time is important, I also think that travel is a valuable learning experience. Even when we are simply traveling within the United States, doing so teaches my children about geography, regional cultural differences and history, and also about flexibility and patience when things don’t go as planned. So how to accommodate both school and travel?

I make sure I know the school calendar. Before the school year even begins, I enter all school holidays, in-service days, and early dismissals into our family calendar. When opportunities for travel arise, I always check to see if they can happen during these times. Being gone from Thursday to Tuesday makes a big difference if the boys get out of school early on Friday and have no school on Monday. All of the 2012 travel we have planned will take place during times when at least one of the days is a school holiday. I also make sure that we never travel during periods of standardized testing.

I’m familiar with the school’s attendance policy. My children’s school allows up to ten unexcused absences a year (all travel is unexcused) before questions about promotion to the next grade come up. I keep careful track of how many days they miss. Generally speaking, careful planning means they miss between 5 and 7 days a year.

I keep the lines of communication open. I always make sure that the boys’ teachers know well in advance when they will miss school – and I’m honest about the reason. Where it is appropriate and fits with what the class is studying (as when we visited Colonial Williamsburg) I offer to have the boys share stories or write reports about their experiences as well.

I make sure my children have their work completed. I have no expectation that time off from school means the boys are excused from the work they do there. When they return to school, it is with all homework and assignments completed. I always offer to have them take tests or complete assignments early as well. To me it is a sign of good faith to take the boys’ schoolwork seriously, just as I’m asking the teachers to respect the value of our family time.

With all of this said, it’s obviously each person’s individual decision about how to handle travel and school. Some children don’t handle disruptions in their school routine well and others have trouble catching up when they miss school. I’m also aware that as the boys get older (next year Tommy enters the unknown waters of middle school) it may be harder on them to miss class. If at any point our family travel starts to affect the boys academically, we will keep it only to school holidays. However, I will point out that more than one of the boys’ teachers has mentioned to me the positive impact that they see travel having on my children in the classroom, how it offers them a wider world view. I say this not to brag, but merely to humbly suggest that there is more than one way for children to learn about the world around them.

I’ve shared a few of my key strategies for traveling during the school year – now I’d love to read about yours. How do you plan school-year travel?

While my family’s trip to New York City last November was all about meeting (and snuggling) my three-month-old nephew in Brooklyn, we did carve out some time for a couple of sightseeing trips in the Big Apple. At 9 and 11, my kids were ideally aged to visit iconic, historic landmarks including the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

In researching our excursion before we left home, I learned that access to the 125-year-old Statue of Liberty is compromised until autumn 2012 for a $27.25 million renovation. That meant, alas, no grueling walk up multiple staircases to the viewing platform in her crown (which bummed me out more than the kids), nor could we enter the pedestal museum. Still, determined to get a close up look at Lady Liberty I went ahead and reserved ferry tickets online for our visit.

We made the trip on a blustery late-fall day. It was overcast and drizzly at times, but the bleak weather added to the allure and romance of visiting the historic sites. In my eyes, anyway; my children would likely disagree!

Consider these firsthand tips for your own visit:

Ferry ride

Purchase tickets online – or wait. Entrance to the National Monuments (operated by the U.S. National Park Service) is free, but you do need to pay for the ferry from Manhattan’s Battery Park to get to both Liberty Island and Ellis Island ($13 for adults, $5 for children). As I mentioned, we pre-booked mid-morning ferry departure tickets online well before our trip to New York City, namely so I’d have it “on the books” and we’d make this sightseeing trip happen. In hindsight, I might have waited until we arrived in New York and scheduled our excursion on a day with a nicer forecast. That said, during peak travel periods – say, spring break or mid-July – it would be disheartening to plan on a visit to the islands and encounter sold-out ferry departures at your desired time.

The multiple Statue Cruises ferries operate on a loop schedule, departing approximately every 25 to 30 minutes from Battery Park, Liberty Island, and Ellis Island. That is, you can come and go as you please from either attraction – spending as much time as you’d like walking the grounds around the Statue of Liberty or perusing the fascinating exhibits at Ellis Island. This is great for families if, say, someone has a meltdown (parent or child!) or the weather turns foul and you need to cut the day short.

Prepare for safety screenings. Since 9/11, security around the Statue of Liberty has been tight. You’ll pass through a metal detector and run your belongings through an X-ray before setting foot on the boat. Leave pocket knives at home. They’ll be confiscated, as my husband learned.

If the weather’s decent, head upstairs. Despite chilly weather, we made our way to the open-air seating on the top of the ferry for unrestricted views of Lower Manhattan as we pulled away from the Battery Park dock. Best views of the Statue of Liberty on approach are on the right side of the ferry; people flock to the railings – elbows flared – to take photos. But don’t worry; you’ll have plenty of time for photos of the statue once you’re on the island. And in my opinion you’ll get better pictures close up.

Bypass the food on board. There’s a small concession stand on the ferry, which sells overpriced hot dogs, chips, drinks, and candy bars. I recommend holding out for lunch at Ellis Island (the second stop on the loop) if you can. Pack snacks in case tummies start grumbling.

Statue of Liberty

Stop by the Visitor Information Center. The park rangers inside the Visitor Information Center are incredibly friendly and helpful, as I’ve found at most U.S. National Parks and National Monuments. Here, they’ll answer any questions you have about the statue, and you can watch a short video and view a wall exhibit about the history of the statue and the island.

Check out the Junior Ranger program. My daughter has collected patches from more than a dozen National Parks after completing Junior Ranger activity booklets, and the Statue of Liberty site was no exception. Delightfully, this was a relatively easy book to fill out, with answers found right in the small Visitor Information Center. Children learn why France wanted to give the U.S. a statue and what she symbolizes (trigging a nice conversation with my kids about the meanings of words like “liberty” and “oppression”), as well as why the statue is green. Kids who complete the book get a plastic pin; we also purchased a sew-on patch at the onsite gift shop.

No need to spend a ton of time here. With the pedestal and crown closed, visitors are limited to learning about the statue at the Visitor Information Center and walking around Liberty Island to admire the massive structure (at 305 feet from the ground to the tip of the torch’s flame, she is impressive). There is a self-guided audio tour (for a fee) and scheduled ranger-guided walking tours (free), though we did neither. I don’t think we spent more than 90 minutes on the island, though we did have to wait a while – more than 30 minutes – to get on the next ferry, as the line was quite long and we just missed boarding one before it filled up.

Ellis Island Immigration Museum

Plan to spend a ton of time here. The Ellis Island Immigration Museum is utterly fascinating, especially for American history buffs like me. The exhibits are housed in the actual building that once served as the country’s busiest immigration processing center. Twelve million men, women, and children passed through its doors, fleeing poverty and persecution in their home countries in search of a more prosperous life in the United States, mainly between 1892 and 1910.

The museum’s photos, artifacts, movies and plaques do an excellent job detailing why Ellis Island saw an influx of action at the turn of the century, what the newcomers encountered as they crossed the ocean, and how they were treated when they arrived on the island. The Park Service recommends spending three hours at Ellis Island, and I agree.

Fuel up before you start exploring the main building. The Dining Café serves hearty burgers, sandwiches, salads and hot entrees like fish and chips, pizza, and chicken tenders. Kids’ meals are reasonably priced under $6. Seating is at long communal tables; similar to what immigrants experienced there more than 100 years ago.

Prepare your tween for a tough Junior Ranger experience. Unlike the booklet at the Statue of Liberty, the activities and questions to earn a Junior Ranger badge at Ellis Island are lengthy and difficult. My daughter completed it – with her dad’s assistance – but it was time consuming. While it’s an educational experience I recommend, I wonder if my daughter might have gotten more out of the exhibits if she hadn’t been so intent on answering specific questions (but the girl likes her patches).

Consider the movie and the self-guided audio tour. A 30-minute film “Island of Hope, Island of Tears” offers an overall introduction to Ellis Island (we didn’t watch it) and an audio tour enhances the information given at the various exhibits on three floors of the main building (we didn’t buy it). I learned plenty simply walking through the different exhibit areas rooms, reading the detailed information.

Did I mention you’ll want to spend a lot of time here? While my son and I breezed through “The Peopling of America,” which chronicles the history of immigration in the United States, we spent more time in “Through America’s Gate,” which details the step-by-step process immigrants went through as soon as they got off the boat, including a mental-health and medical inspection. I also liked “Treasures from Home,” which displays artifacts that people brought from their home countries: beloved teddy bears, Bibles and native clothing. Countless black-and-white photographs, original passenger manifests and passports are shown in “Peak Immigration Years.”

On the top floor, a cramped dormitory room has been restored to show what sleeping quarters were like for those who had been detained, such as parents whose child was sick and had to recover in the neighboring hospital ward before being released into the city. Parents were restricted to visiting hospitalized children only once weekly – what a heartbreaking waiting game!

Do research at the American Family Immigration History Center. For $5 you can sit at a computer screen, with staff on hand to help you, and search the passenger manifests and Ellis Island immigration records for your ancestors. This same database is found online at EllisIsland.org – so you can research from the comfort of your own home, where access is absolutely free. But if you think you’d need assistance from on-site staff, build some time into your sightseeing day to reserve a half hour on the Ellis Island computers.

I’m glad we didn’t take our kids to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island on our first family trip to New York City in 2008 (though on that trip we did enjoy the Staten Island ferry ride for a glimpse of Lady Liberty from afar). The tween and teen years are probably best for introducing kids to the rich history of these important American sights. This New York City sightseeing adventure will be made even better when the restoration of the Statue of Liberty is complete at the end of 2012!

Freelance writer Kara Williams co-owns The Vacation Gals, where she covers destinations ideal for family travel, as well as girlfriend getaways and romantic escapes. She makes her home in the Colorado Rockies with her husband and two school-aged children.

I hadn’t really planned to take a holiday break from blogging, but this was one of those rare occasions when for about ten days I have hardly even turned on my computer. It seems I needed a break, and so, I took one.

That doesn’t mean I’ve been sitting around of course. We drove to Vermont the day after Christmas and although there hasn’t been much skiing, we’ve filled our time quite nicely with winter hikes. This picture comes from the Enchanted Forest, a particularly beautiful piece of trail surrounded by tall evergreens in Camel’s Hump State Park which, as Teddy put it is magical “because all the trees are the same!” For me, the magic comes in the form of those trunks silhouetted against the golden light.

And today, a bit more magic. Just in time for Matt’s birthday, and before we have to head for home, Mad River Glen is opening and we’ll finally take our first runs of the season.

I’ll be back next week with some stories and plans for the new year. See you in 2012!

For Photo Friday at Delicious Baby.

If you’re settling down to your computer for a break while I’m off to do my baking and wrapping and last-minute shopping, I do have a few posts that might help you get in the holiday mood:

• Mondays are for dreaming: The Angel Tree
• MidAtlantic Fun: Christmas at the Brandywine River Museum
• Getting into the Holiday Spirit at Laughing Moon Chocolates

And if you’re looking for some tips about traveling with kids at the holidays, I’ve got those too:

• Planning holiday fun
• Skiing on a holiday weekend
• Road tripping with kids this holiday? Some suggestions

We’ll be leaving the day after Christmas for five days in Vermont. I’m praying for a Christmas miracle of some snow so we can ski at Mad River!

P.S. Did you see that the Passports With Purpose fundraiser was once again a huge success? Thanks to all of you for your donations. As soon as the prizewinners are announced I’ll be sending out that Kindle Fire!

From the very first time Tommy encountered a train table at a toy store in Stoke Newington, the London neighborhood where we spent a month in 2003, he was hooked on all things locomotive. Since he was our first born, this meant that for a number of years trains ruled everyone’s imaginations at our house. As a consequence, we’ve been to train-related attractions around the United States from the small-gage railroad in Zilker Park in Austin to Travel Town in Griffith Park in Los Angeles to the Strasburg Railroad in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And since our stay in Baltimore included a night at the Hotel Monaco, which is housed in the former headquarters of the B&O Railroad, I knew that we had to visit the nearby B&O Railroad Museum.

Tommy’s passion for trains has diminished since he discovered baseball, but he was still excited when he learned that Baltimore is considered the birthplace of the American railroad. In fact, the first stone of the B&O Railroad was laid here in 1828 by Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. The railroad was for many years an important part of the city’s identity and economic landscape.

The museum’s main building is a magnificent 1884 roundhouse that is full of natural light (prudent for one-time railroad workers – now a photographer’s dream). Engines and train cars encircle a turntable in the middle of the building that is so perfectly balanced that one man can push a huge engine around on it by himself. Visitors are free to wander among the trains, some of which are open for viewing.

We visited the museum during its annual holiday celebration, which runs between Thanksgiving and the end of the year. The roundhouse was decorated within an inch of its life, Santa was available for photographs, and a local dance troupe performed selections from its version of The Nutcracker in the middle of the turntable. But most fun of all were the model train layouts. Every weekend features a different model railroading club’s layout; the one we saw was very festive.

When Tommy was a toddler, I’m fairly certain we would have spent the majority of our time in the Kids Zone, perched between a passenger and luggage car. So I was more than a little amused to find that both boys still wanted to hang out there. Teddy (who never displayed the same kind of interest in trains) even dressed up as an engineer.

I’ll admit right now that I didn’t look closely at many of the exhibits in this museum because I’m not actually all that interested in the history of the railroad. To me, this museum is more about my own history as a mother. But I did stroll through the museum’s impressive exhibition titled “The War Came by Train” commemorating the B&O Railroad’s role in the American Civil War. For five years from 2011 through the end of 2015 the museum will remember the war on its sesquicentennial, changing the exhibit each year to reflect on the corresponding year of the war (1861-1865).

Even without paying attention to their historical significance, the trains are beautiful to look at. I especially liked to see the ways that passenger cars on trains once resembled stage coaches. I also liked the Friendship Train, sent by the French to tour the United States after World War II. These trains once moved American and British soldiers around Europe; after the war, the cars were filled with gifts like French wine and were sent to every state and Hawaii – which at that point was still just a territory.

Outside the roundhouse there are still more trains to see, including a caboose kids can climb all around. There are also several model layouts as well as a station from which you can board a train and ride for 20 minutes along the first commercial mile of train track laid in the United States. If you think your children won’t be impressed by that fact alone, you might plan your ride for a weekend in December when Frosty the Snowman and Santa will be along for the ride. Or perhaps you might just take them for a ride on the Train Carousel, which moves inside during the colder months.

Or maybe your children, like mine, will just be contented to watch the magic of the model trains traveling endlessly in their perfect landscapes of childhood dreams.