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!”

Read More >

The time has come. Your “baby” is going off to college. While this milestone is thrilling and exciting there are some things you can do to help the transition be a little less painless for them and you:

Read More >

A long summer has ended, and the children are finally back in school. As has been done for generations, one of their first assignments is to write the good ol’ “what I did for my summer vacation” essay. Do you want your kid to hand in an essay extolling the fun had playing video games, going to a generic day camp, and hanging out in the backyard? A summer vacation spent (in part) engaged in interesting family travel experiences will provide not just meaningful memories and help promote family closeness, but also make for a more exciting “what I did for my summer vacation” essay; the kind that ends up on the fridge along with good grades, creative drawing, and other artifacts of childhood that decorate refrigerators across the country.

Read More >