How To Visit the MoMA With Your Grown-Up

1) Indulge your grown-up by visiting the “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917” exhibition (through October 11^th), but then make sure to drag them to the photography exhibit around the corner featuring people grasping pickles with their toes in Erwin Wurm’s series of One Minute Sculptures and artist Hannah Wilke’s body art showing her with pieces of chewing gum stuck all over her body. Try to convince your grown-up to let you try all of this at home…all in the name of art, of course.

2) Strongly advise your grown-up to buy tickets in advance. Warn them that not doing so may result in loud and persistent whining while you wait in the long line that wraps around the building. While your grown-up is online getting tickets, show them how to get to Destination Modern Art, a website designed especially for kids about the MoMA: http://moma.org/interactives/destination/#.

3) If your grown-up is all about eating like ours is, take your pick from the MoMA’s three restaurants: Café 2, Terrace 5, or The Modern. We opted for the least fancy-pants of the three, Café 2. With its extensive menu of paninis, soups, salads, salumi, and cheeses, it is definitely in the running for best cafeteria food ever. It also nabs an honorable mention for the most Stokke high chairs we’ve ever seen in one place at one time.

4) Come up with a wish of your very own to add to Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.

Yoko Ono's Wish Tree

We don't really know how to read or write yet, but we're making up something to put on The Wish Tree

5) Ignore the helicopter mom who tries to body block you from infecting her pristine and undoubtedly excessively gifted and talented child in the Shape Lab, an area designed especially for young children to imagine and create and build and design with all sorts of blocks and geometric and organic shapes and 3D forms.

Beware the helicopter parents flocking to this one

Not nearly as cool as putting chewing gum all over ourselves...

...Or putting pickles between our toes, but we're still working up to that

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 11 West 53^rd Street, New York, New York 10019-5497, (212) 708-9400, www.moma.org; Hours: Closed on Tuesdays; Sun/Mon/Wed/Thu/Sat: 10:30 AM to 5:30 PM; Open Thursdays in July and August until 8:45 PM; Admission: Adults: $20; Children 16 and under: free.