My house in the Colorado Rockies sits at 7,000 feet. For me, driving on snowy roads, dressing for winter weather and acclimating to high altitudes is second nature. But when any sea-level house guests come to visit my mountain home in the cold-weather months, I usually email them a few tips to help them best be prepared for the thinner air and potential snowstorms.

Here is my advice for traveling to the mountains in the winter. Read More >

Holidays and travel go hand in hand. After all, it’s a special time to gather with family members between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, plus the kids have school vacation, so there’s plenty of time to snuggle up with Grandma around the hearth, or see the sights on a much-anticipated winter trip.

Of course, when you’re traveling with extended family – or you just have a big family yourself – different personalities can clash, it might be tough to get everyone organized and out the door, and late bedtimes can cause meltdowns (for kids and parents).

Here are a few tips for keeping your holidays stress-free when you’re traveling with large families this season.

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I started preserving memories of my travels when I was a kid – taping Disney World tickets and Nantucket postcards into a traditional scrapbook, whose pages are now crumbly and yellowed. Then, in the 1990s when I vacationed a lot with my then-boyfriend, now-husband, I moved on to the Creative Memories brand of albums, where I decorated acid-free (archival-quality) pages in big books with not only my hard-copy photos, but colorful “frames,” stickers and borders. Lately, I’ve made photo-book gifts with digital images of special trips I’ve taken with extended family, and I’ve also experimented with Creative Memories’ digital software.

The bottom line: I love to scrapbook, and I wish I had more time to do it! Especially since my children love to pull out my custom-made photo albums and browse through them, exclaiming as they turn pages, “Remember the vacation when Ben got stung by a jellyfish?” and “That roller coaster went so fast!”

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It’s a catch-22 among moms across the nation. We adore love the lazy, hazy days of summer – and all of the vacations and outdoor fun that come with three months off of school. However, we also appreciate when September rolls around and the kids are fully occupied for more than six hours a day. As much as we love not having to make lunches, sign permission slips and get kiddos to the bus on time from June to August, there is a sense of relief (admit it!) when that school bell rings again in the fall.

So, how can you best make that transition from relaxed summer mode into hectic school schedules? Here are some tips.

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