Daytrippers

Amelia's son Catcher at Lake Metroparks Farmpark

I get depressed in the winter. My skin gets dry. The sun disappears, taking my happy disposition along with it. I curse myself for moving back to Cleveland and imagine the tiny restaurant my husband and I could have opened in Key West. It takes me a hour and a half to get my kids dressed in their Ohio winter gear, and by the time we set off, they fall asleep. I drive on the slush-covered roads secretly wishing I were stuck in LA traffic. I am so a Clevelander.

I have noticed that as a community, we collectively despise winter. We yell at the TV when the weatherman tells us it’s going to snow and when it does snow, we yell at the snow trucks for getting salt on our cars. From December to May, we officially hate living in Cleveland.

But we shouldn’t. We should embrace the winter and all its white wonder. If you dig deep enough, you can easily find some pretty spectacular things to kill your winter blues in Cleveland.

Our family is not the most conventional. We are restaurant owners, so we have crazy late hours and infrequent days off. However, when we do have time together, we always make sure to embrace the city we chose to raise our family in – come rain, sleet, hail, fog or snow.

My winter depression subsides when I see babies. Any kind of baby will do. Most recently I found myself at Lake Metroparks Farmpark. It was 9 million degrees below zero and for some reason I thought it would be a great idea to bundle the kids up in their snow suits and walk around a farm. Turns out, it actually was.

The farmpark in the winter is a breeding ground of cute. Within the first five minutes of being there, we met Ursula, a baby calf born six days before our visit. We met other baby "moo cows", as my son Catcher so eloquently named them when he was a baby. Our visit to the farmpark also introduced us to the most adorable piglets in the entire universe. I almost gave up bacon after meeting those precious piggies.

Another way our family chooses to embrace Cleveland when it’s covered in white is by hitting the museum circuit. Three out of the seven days of the week, you can find the kids and myself trudging through the snow from museum to museum. We like start at the Cleveland Museum of Art. My children are young, so I like to do a pseudo scavenger hunt with the art. We decided on a theme, such as fruit, and then we try to find pieces of art that show fruit. When their attention spans start to fade, we head across the circle to the dino museum, aka The Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

The dino museum is our favorite. We spend the majority of our winter there. My children are enamored with dinosaur bones, and I am particularly fond of the special exhibits. Currently, there is a wicked cool dinosaur exhibit called Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries. It shows a scale model of how a T. rex walks, among other things. Throughout the winter, the Natural History Museum and Cleveland Museum of Art also offer interesting classes, providing kids with much needed outlets for their energy.

We are a family driven by food. We love food, and we love Cleveland: We love Cleveland food. When the family and I hit the museum circuit, we often make a day of it, grabbing lunch after. I find myself taking my kids to some really great – and healthy – restaurants in this city during the winter.

Superior Pho keeps us warm when the temps are frigid. My kids love to go there after a long morning at the museums. We order big bowls of pho and slurp them down as fast as we can to get warm. If my kids manage to eat all their lunch (they always do), bubble teas all around!

A new favorite of ours is Wonton Gourmet. The large pictures of food covering the walls and the TV blaring Chinese soap operas immediately attracted my son. The beautiful thing about taking kids to Wonton Gourmet is the ease of picking out food. The menu photos along the wall encourage my kids to try different things. If my son sees something he likes in a picture on the wall, he orders it. 

We bemoan the frigid temps, salt covered cars and slippery roads that take over Cleveland, but the negativity must end. Get out of the house and into the places that make this city dynamic and beautiful. Snow or no snow.