Earlier this fall, my wife Lala and I had told Poppy she needed to do something active—take hip-hop dance, join a gym, jazzercise, her choice—and surprisingly she went postal on us and up and joined the cross country team. In my family, you only ran if you were chasing a ball or being chased by my dad and his wooden spoon of tough love.

Being stuffed into a minivan may cause some minor disagreements, like whether or not “Gucci Bandana” is an appropriate song for an 8-year-old boy, but it also can promote conversation, as I found out this past summer when my former sister-in-law, Mimi, and two nieces, Maddie and Samantha, flew from Pennsylvania to stay with us.

Last spring my wife Lala somehow fancied herself a gardener and started planting like Johnny Appleseed—if Johnny were a Janey and had taken liberal doses of speed.

For those of you outside the yoga thrill cult, Kripalu is a major yoga center nestled in the Berkshires approximately three hours north of New York City. Citing Kripalu to my old high school chum was akin to mentioning backdoor access to The Vatican in a room full of rosary-bead-worrying Catholics.

When my wife Lala proposed purchasing a trampoline, I couldn’t help but think like my old man: When she said fresh air, I pictured fresh bone breaks; when she said exercise, I envisioned lacerated exoepidermis. Instead of scoffing at the idea and truly morphing into my dad, I did extensive research, pouring over injury statistics, case studies and hospital records.

After the kids had finished their school-related camping trips, field days and locker cleanups, and once I stopped seeing blue (books) after grading exams, we decided to have what folks are calling a “staycation:” staying in a hotel and playing tourist in your hometown.
Like many families who consider themselves “locals” in a popular tourist destination, we’d been avoiding the areas that attract outsiders.

Maybe it’s our fault for creating a history of elaborately themed parties for his older sister Poppy or for sustaining a Thursday-night ritual in front of CBS at 7 pm...

Puerto Peñasco is a former fishing village-turned-vacation-destination, a mere 12 hours away from Santa Fe or, if you’re traveling in a minivan with two kids, the journey translates to about eight DVDs with some time added for bickering as to whether Iron Man’s Robert Downey Jr. beats School of Rock’s Jack Black when it comes to charisma and believability.

My youngest brother, whom we refer to lovingly (and accurately) as Crazy Eddie, has lived in Orlando, Fla. since before the Animal Kingdom was built, most of those years working as an entertainer for the largest media and entertainment company in the world

My beautiful sonchild sporting a mullock (mullet + dreadlock) and morphing into a Boulder hippie, trying to score weed on a lonely street corner, all while wearing socks with leather flip-flops?