Do your kids have a food allergy? Chef extraordinaire Erin McKenna showed us that even the most allergy-prone child need not go without cupcakes. Her bakeries, based in New York, Los Angeles, and Disney World, Babycakes, have made it easy for anyone to indulge in gluten-free, wheat-free, or sugar-free cakes, cookies and donuts. Using healthy ingredients like coconut oil and fresh spices, the treats are a guilt-free indulgence. Her cookbook has made it easy to replicate the recipes at home. And now, an accompanying iPhone App makes it easier than ever to recreate these amazing treats. Even if you’re one of the lucky ones who has no food allergies, the recipes are delicious and enjoyable whenever, and provide a healthy alternative to more sugar-laden treats.

The Babycakes App features how-to videos with indie music from Bubbles, Cult and Dinosaur Jr. It even features a celeb endorsement from Kiernan Shipka, Mad Men’s own Sally Draper, herself a big fan of gluten-free baking. Download the app to make delicious gluten-free recipes like pretzels, sandwich bread, waffles, s’mores and teacakes.McKenna even borrows recipes from the likes of Momofuku and Del Posto. While it’s not always easy to find the ingredients necessary to make great gluten-free baking, if you’re willing to do a little research, and even order online, it becomes easy to incorporate healthy ingredients into your kitchen everyday. Plus you can bring cupcakes to school and not worry if there are any kids who can’t eat them.

Ocean Terry Oversize Fouta Towel, Nine Space
Reversible Beach Chair, Julie Brown Designs
Lunch Pot, Black + Blum
Wooden Utensils, Sucre
Splish Splash Pool Party Invites, Paper Culture
Baby Float with Sun Canopy, Swimways
Lomography Camera, La Sardina
Summer Fun Paper Plates, Tag
Medium Tote Bag, J.Crew x Sea Bags

Start off your watery escapades with one of Paper Culture’s summer party invitations, find the one that best fits your pool party, and invite all your dear family and friends. Then pack a picnic lunch in Black + Blum’s ingenious lunch pot to eat with the crafty wooden utensils from Sucre. And, as always, a camera in fun colors to document the memories.

Needless to say, my daughter’s first pool adventure was a blast for the entire family filled with yummy food, refreshing water games, and laughs and relaxation. We practically had to drag her out of the water with promises of future pool parties!

How many times have you been at a museum or gallery and wished you could interact or play with the art? Personally I’ve had to restrain myself more than a few times. In one instance, in a gallery in Japan, kids were unable to stop themselves from playing with a large crocheted installation by artist  Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam. As a result, MacAdam listened to her audience and built her first large-scale crocheted playground just for kids in Tokyo. The result was something straight out of a fairy tale.

Over twenty years later, MacAdam is still designing gorgeous crocheted landscapes. She works with her husband in Nova Scotia, Canada to build the playgrounds on a wider scale through their company Interplay Design and Manufacturing. The playgrounds are all natural, free from sharp metals and plastic, and thus provide a safe and creative environment for kids to explore. The nets adapt and take shape with the children’s movements. Lucky kids get to crawl, jump, burrow and hop through the sculptures. We hope to see more of these popping up in cities around the world.

Image: Romulo Yanes

Mayor Bloomberg recently announced that he plans on banning super-sized sugary beverages from New York City’s restaurants and food vendors. While it’s not without controversy, we can appreciate measures intended to create a healthier city. Indeed, Bloomberg’s ban on smoking in public places and trans fats from restaurants has set the bar high for many other major cities. The good news is that banning soda doesn’t necessarily mean limiting yourself to H2O for life, although there’s nothing wrong with that. For special treats, there are plenty of homemade sodas that can be made while skipping the sugar and the chemicals. And they’re simple and fun to make, even for kids. Here’s a few recipes to try at home from Cherry-Vanilla to classic Ginger.

Cherry-Vanilla Soda

3 cups 100% unsweetened black cherry juice

1 vanilla bean (about 6 inches long)

Seltzer or soda water

Simmer the black cherry juice and vanilla bean in a medium-size saucepan for 35 to 40 minutes. Chill the remaining syrup in the fridge. Pour 1/4 cup into a tall glass with ice and fill to top with soda water.

Serves 4

Ginger Beer

Two tablespoons ginger

1 lemon

Stevia

Soda Water

Grate the ginger very finely and add to a jar or large glass. Squeeze a lemon on top and let it soak for an hour. Add a few drops of stevia, a natural, pretty harmless sweetener. Add soda water and ice and drink up.

Serves 1

Mashed Berry Bliss

1/2 cup blackberries

1/2 cup raspberries

Stevia

Soda Water

Lightly crush the berries with a fork and put at the bottom of a large pitcher. Fill with soda water and refrigerate for one hour. Add stevia to taste.

Serves 4

We at Paper Culture are all about raising our children green from Day 1. Whether by choosing eco diapers or finding innovative cribs that grow with our children, we love finding products that make it easy. But what about once your child finally outgrows that crib? Our friends over at Lil Sugar have put together a collection of repurposed cribs from creative mothers and scavengers.

Check these photos that show how a repurposed crib can turn into a stylish new desk, a classic bench, a craft station, or a bookshelf. All you need is a little bit of imagination and maybe the DIY help of a friend who knows their way around a toolbox. Let your kids take part and have fun with the painting and decorating and show them that no perfectly good piece of furniture has to end up on the street. And don’t just stop with the crib. Any baby item coud easily be turned into something new. Think a quilt out of old baby clothes, a collage made from old books, or a ladder from a wooden highchair. Have you ever recycled a baby item into something more functional?

A slew of startups, from Birchbox to TestTube are allowing ladies to sample new beauty products monthly. You sign up for a subscription (anywhere from $10-$50) and get a surprise box with a selection of miniature or fullsize samples to try out monthly or quarterly. We tried out Birchbox, and were disappointed by the small size of the samples. (Why pay for free samples?) Although most people don’t need more toiletries to fill their beauty kits, it’s a fun service that feels like getting a surprise present in the mail every few weeks.

We just discovered Eco-Emi, based in St. Charles, MO, a company that operates on the same principles, but with green goodies. The growing world of organic products can be daunting in deciphering the good from the bad. Eco-Emi gives users a carefully-curated selection of products to help them discover what’s worth adding to their daily regime. A recent box included nine samples, including eco-friendly bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and fragrance, all from companies with a conscience. At $15 a month, including shipping, the products turned out to be well worth the cost. We think an eco stationery box of the month club would be a fun idea, and it would certainly get us writing more personal letters.

The fitbit also has an altimeter, so it records how many stairs you walk up and down a day. It also figures out the elevation of hills. I went on a hike and it decided that I had climbed 14 floors. Which is ok with me. I doesn’t seem to add floors if I take an elevator. Drats!

The fitbit itself is really small. It fits nicely in your pocket. I wear it on waistband of my yoga pants most days. I have had it for almost 2 months and I have yet to misplace it. I have forgotten to wear it a few times and then I get strangely annoyed that my steps weren’t counted like last night when we walked from swimming lessons to a local restaurant.

I think that the most inspiring (frightening?) aspect of the fitbit is that and charts your entire day’s activity including sleep on a nice little graph on your computer. You also get a pretty little pie chart that shows how “sedentary” “lightly active” “fairly active” and “very active” you have been during the day. It is shocking to me to see that I have been sedentary for 13 hours of the day (that is what sitting in front of the computer will do!). But to keep you motivated, you get little badges every time you do 5k or 10k steps and others for 10 or 25 floors. And if your friends get fitbits as well, you can see what they are doing, which is a lot of fun. You can also input your sleep and caloric intake, but I haven’t gotten that crazy yet. But maybe soon.

When it comes to eating right, there’s a diet out there for almost every type of food preference. However, there’s one rule that almost every living-well philosophy can agree upon: stay away from processed food. The trend of bringing fresh food straight from the farm to your table has prompted many a new mother to forego traditional jars of baby food and make their own. But without the right tools and planning ahead, it’s hard to take the extra step for many a new mother with a million other things on her plate.

A new company, based in New York, Farm to Baby, takes all the stress out of the constant dilemma of what to feed our kids. Farm to Baby works with a select group of local farms, choosing only those that forego harmful herbicides and pesticides, to choose in season crops chock full of nutrients. They deliver freshly pureed food in glass jars to feed your baby throughout the week. Plans range from “Sit” at $45 a week to “Crawl” at $99 a week, depending on the volume of food your child needs. This week’s menu includes delicious mashes like purple top turnips and kabocha squash. When you’re done they pick up the jars and recycle them, meaning a zero waste menu.

Although a food delivery system seems a bit excessive and indulgent for a newborn, it’s a healthy program that any busy mom could appreciate. And starting your baby early on nutritious food can set them on a lifelong path of eating well. Expect to see this type of service opening in cities nationwide very soon.

I’m not a designer, but having been lucky enough to be surrounded by designers for most of my life, I’m able to pick up some of their best tips. Before the web, the library was the go-to place for inspiration. Scrolling through old graphic design books, old posters, postcards, anything might get a designer’s brain going. Today the task is much easier, with thousands upon thousands of image websites, whose sole mission is to inspire.

Lately, my favorite is Baubauhaus. Started by two guys in Romania, Baubauhaus is a “garden” of photos, posters, illustrations, graphics, product design, and typography. Whenever I’m in need of a five-minute break or simply a visual dessert, I scroll through the seemingly endless images on the site, from old advertising spreads to new photoshop wonders to vintage film posters. It has an intuitive search that lets you dive into decades of historical design within a few seconds. If you click on a yellow image, you’ll get dozens more great yellow pictures. Clicking on a pop art image will get you loads more of pop images. With the nonstop clutter on the web, it’s great to have a carefully curated site to help needle through the drudge. What are your favorite sites for visual or written inspiration?

They only had one pressure cooker, so I felt like I need to do a bit more research on the internet. Someone was baking some sort of cookies at the store and it smelled so good. I lingered, hoping to get a cookie. I saw the chef (can you actually be a chef at a Williams-Sonoma store???) pull them out of the oven. I must assume, that in fear of a potential lawsuit since they were hot and could possibly burn someone’s mouth or fingers, he zipped them away into a back room to cool.

I was sad. I wanted a cookie. But I didn’t want to wait or shop any longer. Then I got happy again because I saw that he had made Momofuku’s Milk Bar’s amazing corn cookies from a mix. And that I could buy that very same mix along with the blueberry and cream and compost flavored cookies. Momofuku Milk Bar is this fantastic bakery in NYC where you get crazy treats like cereal milk soft-serve and the “crack” pie, which is so yummy that it is literally is addictive. The cookies are so buttery that the wrapper is almost translucent with grease. They are also selling the Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook as well, so you can make their delicacies from scratch, if you are willing to see the amount of butter and cream that goes into these. Since one of my New Year’s resolutions is not indulge in excessive sweets, I will probably be waiting until August to bake these. But it is good to know that they are available.