Pink boots and a booster seat.

​A few months ago, I discovered that the show of the year was coming. Not Radiohead or Wilco, or even Warbeast. This was a little different. It was something that my 5-year-old niece and her posse are totally nuts over: Pinkalicious the Musical.

Excitement started building weeks ago. I'm sure outfits were planned days ahead. Pink boots (pictured) were donned early in the day.

When we arrived the lobby of the Eisemann Center was friendly chaos with a milling crowd reading for the Family Theatre Series production. There was no easy way to spot a child, no "side ponytail pink bow" identification system. It was a sea of pinks and purples and tables of similarly hued merch (wands, dolls, unicorns, puzzles, stickers, all the -licious books) -- oh, and adults with cups of white wine. Though, to be fair, they may have been headed for the Larry Miller show in the other theater.

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My first DIY mommy business card. Handing this card to an adult is rude. Handing it to a baby would be awesome, though.

​Minted.com is currently running a promotion for free mommy business cards, offering you 25 cards free (you just have to pay for shipping). If you have a kid, you've seen these at the playground. I once had a woman proposition me with one of these while I was shopping at Target.

My run-ins with these cards have always been really strange. They generally have the mother's name on top and then the job description is like, "Sally's Mom." I always think, "Why'd you just go with 'Mom' as your title and not something more awesome?" Sure, being a mother is rad, circle of life, yada yada, but if we're making our own job titles up -- let's really do this, ladies. I'm sure the idea of the card is to speed up the playgroup-phone-number-exchange process, but instead, they just make the whole process even weirder than it already is.

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Jennifer Davis-Lamm

Baby takes in the wonderment of puppetry and a bit of a snack.

​At the beginning of the summer, I made a meticulous schedule of activities to get Baby out of the house and expose her to a bit of culture. After all, summer is the time where all manner of cultural activities move outside and encourage kids to explore, play and learn.

And then I watched, day by day, as symphony concerts in local parks got scratched off my list because it was still 100 degrees at 7 p.m. and zoo outings were postponed because the asphalt in the parking lots was literally too melty to push the stroller through. Even indoor activities that wouldn't normally be a question spurred debates of whether it was worth it to strap Baby into a car seat and make her sweat it out as the car fought to push air conditioning to the outer limits of the back seat.

People told me to take her to water parks, but since I'm not a fan of diarrhea, we opted to buy a bunch of books, crank WRR, and stay in the house for the most part.

I haven't given up on finding ways to entertain and stimulate Baby's growing noggin, despite the challenging temperatures, and when my husband noticed that the Dallas Puppet Theater was performing the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin last weekend, we jumped at the chance to have a little family fun outside our own four walls.

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Jennifer Davis-Lamm

Baby loves the stingray, and by the looks of it, the stingray loves Baby.

​At some point a few weeks ago, I stopped scanning local arts calendars looking for events and activities that were the most stimulating for Baby's now eleven-month-old brain and started looking for things with the best air conditioners. Hell hath no fury like an overheated infant, and so the criminally underappreciated Children's Aquarium at Fair Park met all our criteria for a summer cultural trip for Baby: It's cold; it's visually arresting; and there's a carefully rendered artistic interpretation of the Trinity River bottom that I'm going to go ahead and proclaim as art. It's art, ok? See how that works?

Really, though, this little oasis in Fair Park is a quaint alternative to the fancy Dallas World Aquarium downtown. It's way cheaper, and it's not as overwhelming for the under-2 set who need to get in and out before naptime. And if you can time it after all the field trips leave in mid-afternoon, it's a quiet place where the little one can take his or her time to appreciate all of the exhibits, most of which are at eye-level for optimum kiddo perusal.

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Michael Brosilow

Almost positive that Lyle Hughey wants to be Lex Ishimoto/Billy Elliot in "Angry Dance."

​Our theater critic, Elaine Liner, thought Billy Elliot The Musical was a blast. Set against the backdrop of the 1984 British National Union of Mineworkers strike, the story of a miners' son who defies his dad by taking ballet lessons and preparing for an audition with a prestigious dance academy was a hit with the audience on opening night.

I figured my kids, 13-year-old daughter Iris and particularly 9-year-old son Lyle, would enjoy it as well.

Now, if you're wondering what kind of 9-year-old boy would enjoy a musical about a ballet dancer, I understand. I would have wondered the same thing a few years ago. But since even before he could walk, Lyle has loved dancing, and so we finally enrolled him in dance classes at Studios on the Edge after we moved to Oak Cliff.

I wouldn't go so far as to say he's a real-life Billy Elliot, as he had the support of both parents -- but in my case, it was perhaps more reluctant than I'd like to admit, as much as I like to think of myself as a progressive, open-minded man. So I could at least sympathize with Billy's dad, who is shocked that his boy gives up boxing for what he perceives as a sissy pursuit. I figured Lyle would identify strongly with a character who pursues his dancing passion in spite of the mockery of others from his town.

Turns out, notsamuch. But he and his sister still thought it was, in their words, "awesome." Even if Lyle's critical eye spotted a possible slip-up.

Check out their post-show impressions, and a conversation with a father of a different sort, after the jump.

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Courtesy Il Giardino dei Lauri. Courtesy of Kim Heirston Art Advisory, LLC.

Aaron Curry's "Big Pink," 2011

​As a relatively new mom, I'll admit that the things I don't know about raising a kid could probably fill all of that empty real estate in Victory Park and then circle round for last call at Ghostbar. For example, while at a 4-year-old's birthday party a few weeks ago, I learned from the other moms that I've likely ruined my child's chances for any sort of intellectual accomplishment because I don't have her on any lists for preschool admission. The discussion went a little like this:
Moms: So, which lists do you have her on?
Me: What lists?
Moms: (silent and unforgiving judgment)

After researching area schools and reviewing my options (including moving into someone's storage shed in Highland Park, starving so that we can send her to private school, moving to China, or joining the Hare Krishnas), I decided I should probably give my nine-month-old as many advantages right now as humanly possible. As such, I've embarked on an odyssey of cultural discovery within our fair city in hopes that exposing her to as much art, music and intellectually stimulating activity will help bolster whatever education we can provide for her when it's time to send her off to school. I know she's too young to discern a Renaissance sculpture from Ren Faire airbrushing, but I do know that her attention is captured, even momentarily, by vivid colors, conspicuous lines and lush musical notes.

The other advantage to this endeavor is that it gets us out of the house, and any parent of young children (twins notwithstanding) can attest to the power of a little field trip to break up the nap-play-eat-scream cycle. And so, finding myself jonesing for an experience that didn't involve scraping cereal puffs off the carpet, I loaded Baby into the car last Saturday and headed to the Nasher Sculpture Center.

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