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• Crafty: 150 Ideas To Beat the I'm Boreds

  I may be about to put Crafty out of business by posting this link but it is a risk I'm willing to take if it will save us all from a month or two of piteous cries of "I'm boooooooored."   Read More... Posted Jun 27 2008, 09:00 AM by Adrienne Martini with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: beer, camping, crafty, lists, 150 things, foot rubs, fairy house

• Kitchenista: Orange You Glad I Didn't say Banana

  I am a bad camper. I fail to see the point of peeing in the woods when we have a perfectly good bathroom at home. I don't like sleeping on the ground and am downright surly when forced to do so. However, I do have a soft spot for things that can be cooked in a roaring fire, like these muffins, which are baked in the rind of an orange.   Read More... Posted May 08 2008, 03:30 PM by Adrienne Martini with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: fire, camping, kitchenista, muffins, oranges

• Weekly Check-Up: Men Are Not All the Same

  Researchers from the Kinsey Institute have made this groundbreaking discovery: Men are not all from Mars. "We're probably from a whole bunch of different planets," says one of the study's authors. What the hell are we talking about? Well, men vary widely in frequency of sexual desire, in what turns them on, and in what an erection means. You mean they don't all just need a picture of Pamela Anderson in a bathing suit and ten minutes in the shower? Yeah. So I guess dads are just as diverse in their interests and the amount of hummada hummada they want as moms. This should be news to anyone who never met more than one man in their entire life.  Guess what turned on an overwhelming majority of guys? Read More... Posted May 01 2008, 05:01 PM by Kelly Mills with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: research study, vacation, lust, dads, moms, love, women, men, camping, relationships, outdoors, weekly check-up, desire, arousal, pam anderson

• Would You Camp Out To Get Your Kid in a Good Preschool?

  In Houston, some parents have been sleeping in tents and in their trucks since Friday, saving a place in line to enroll their children and grandchildren in the Houston Junior Forum Community House Preschool. There are 39 slots available for entering children, and these parents--many of them alum of the school themselves--are determined to secure places for their kids in the first-come, first-served registration process. One former grad, who also sent her daughter to the school, recently took camping shifts in line to help her nephew get a spot. She said, "Making a sacrifice like this for your child, with this weather, there's nothing you won't do for your kids." What makes this school so special?... Read More... Posted Jan 21 2008, 01:08 PM by Kelly Mills with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: preschool, education, camping, Houston, sacrifice, enrollment, opportunity, hispanic, english as a second language, best schools

• Big Camper, Small House: Confessions of an Eco-Hellion

  Admittedly, I'm an urban kind of gal.  My idea of roughing it is going 2 days without a latte.  So camping in a tent and sleeping on the ground isn't going to happen... and especially not with kids.  Enter the fifth wheel mini-cabin extraordinairre.  It has bathrooms, electricity, water, television, and wireless Internet.  It has a gas stove, air conditioning, a sweet comfortable bunk bed for each kid and a master suite with its own bathroom. Read More... Posted Aug 29 2007, 06:59 PM by Rachael Brownell (Redsy) with | with no comments Filed under: not so big house, rv trips, camping, nature deficit disorder, camping with kids, fifth wheel, trailer

• Solar Powered Grill: Fun in Mother Nature's Kitchen

  I'm not sure I understand the connection between competitive boomerang-ing and the need for a solar powered cooking device, but never mind. I'm excited about this more sophisticated version of the hot dog cookers my class made in sixth grade, which we used to cook our own lunches at the end-of-the-year picnic (mine worked okay, not great). I really love projects that I can do with my kids that kill a lot of time and result in something we can eat, so we may be trying this one out—or if not this one, one of the many other solar cookers that you can make from plans available all over the internet and power with summer's glow. According to my sister-in-law and her daughters, you can make a hell of a cobbler in a solar oven. Doesn't that sound better on a camping trip than nasty old s'mores? I might not have to rely on my husband's campfire-making skills forever.     Posted Jul 18 2007, 05:23 PM by Patti with | with no comments Filed under: outdoor activities, camping, solar cooking, solar power, ecology

• Kids Need the Outdoors

  Wondering why so many kids nowadays are obese, play video games nonstop, and squint when every time they get in real sunlight? According to Richard Louv, we are cloistering our children inside, robbing them of communion with nature. The pressure to get kids to succeed academically so they can get into Hah-vard, lack of big fields and other spaces for kids to run around, and to a certain extent T.V. and iPods are all fingered in his book, Last Child in the Woods. And he also looks at the way we parent today. "'The underbelly of this issue is that parents are scared to death,' Louv said. 'Parents are terrified that some stranger is going to take their kids at the corner.' He blamed the national media for taking a handful of terrible crimes against children, magnifying and repeating them over and over, to create a national state of fear." Amen to that! So many of us are completely freaked about "stranger danger" and restrict our kids' freedom. I know I was allowed to walk the few blocks to the store by the time I was seven, and I still can't imagine my child doing the same, even though I grew up in an urban environment too. As for camping, hiking, and fishing...Well, with so much of our beautiful outdoor space being destroyed, we'll be lucky if we can take the kids to a crowded campsite in a few years. Louv has some great thoughts on all these issues. It's hard to let your kid roam freely when you know he or she will be the only kid out there without a grown-up following right behind, chattering about adult supervision and the next scheduled activity. Posted Jun 26 2007, 03:24 PM by Kelly Mills with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: obesity, television watching, camping, nature

• Kitchenista: Live from the Great Outdoors

  Well, not live, really. I went camping last weekend and had no internet access (ack!), so let's call it tape-delayed. It falls to me to plan meals when we camp, especially if we're not camping with a larger group and sharing the load. I'd probably be better at it, but my experience with camping as a kid involved bringing pretty much a full kitchen along with us, and this experience doesn't translate to a backpacking stove very well. I mean, we ate spaghetti when we went camping back in the day, for pete's sake. Inspiration for this trip came from another childhood memory, which ironically we prepared and ate inside, always. However, it originated in my mom's Campfire Girl days, and it's a well-known outdoor cooking trip: folding individual meals into foil packets and cooking them in the coals. My mom called these "hobo dinners", which probably isn't very politically correct but is definitely more evocative and fun to say than "foil packets cooked in coals". Read More... Posted Jun 20 2007, 04:33 PM by Patti with | with no comments Filed under: food, cooking, camping, kitchenista

• Worst. Summer. Camp. Ever: Banking Camp!

  I'm supposed to be packing for a weekend getaway, but the very idea of a summer camp designed to teach fiscal responsibility is just too good to pass up. What sort of moron sends their kid to summer banking camp? I would so hate to be one of these kids. The Scene: A schoolyard. Summer is over. Boys huddle in a circle. Read More... Posted Jun 17 2007, 02:16 PM by Mike Adamick (Cry It Out!) with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: finances, camp, financial planning, camping

• The Bear That Almost Ate a Girl Scout

  About an hour north of where I live are the lovely Poconos, a mountainish land of champagne-glass hot tubs and huge round beds (so I hear) and also some good-enough skiing and snow tubing, and trees and stuff. Oh, and bears. Which is what a pack of Girl Scouts found trying to remove one of their toothsome tween members from a tent recently where they were camping at (no laughing) Camp Mosey Wood. The eleven-year-old managed to grab a tent pole and slide out of her sleeping bag. After a lot of screaming (girls in groups are good at that), the adults in the party hustled everyone into bear-free vehicles and then made a command decision outlawing tents for the duration. The story could have ended a lot differently, in which case would you still be thinking about those Poconos hot tubs? I thought not.  Posted Jun 08 2007, 11:02 AM by Karen Murphy with | with no comments Filed under: pennsylvania, Poconos, bears, camping, Girl Scouts