This weekend my family and I are heading out for a weekend of camping. This time we’re heading down to Spring Mill State Park in southern Indiana. This will be our second year of camping together as a family and we love it! We’ve learned quite a bit about what our family needs and wants to make our trips fun and enjoyable, one of the locations we found with links and resources to other information is the AllProDad.com website.

The website has much more than just resources about camping too. You can find information about being a dad of course, activities to do with your children and family, marriage, your professional life, and the changes of being a dad at all the stages of raising your kids.

There’s a lot more to AllProDad than just resources too. If you’re a father you need to visit this website and improve your skills and awareness of what it takes to become an even better dad than you are now. Be an All-Pro Dad.

Uncover resources for being a dad at AllProDad.com

Image: Snagit of AllProDad.com website

We’ve all had them. Those family photos that we wish we could go back in time and retake or just not show up for at all. I’ve got a family Christmas photo that catches me in an award-winning stupid grin, and also highlights my waistline as you can almost hear the button on my shirt screaming to release and pop-off.

The Awkward Family Photos website captures these photos we wish were never taken and shares them with the universe. Something scary and hilarious about it at the same time.

As you can see from the screen shot above from the site, I can’t even show you all of the current photo. It’s too much. Really? Really? You decided to get your picture taken like that? You’re going to have to visit the Awkward Family Photos website to see for yourself.

One question I have, how do they get these photos? They say they’re submitted by people, but I’ve got to think even your friends wouldn’t do this to you! Only one more reason to make sure those embarrassing photos never make it out for public viewing.

Hat tip to my friend Cherie Lowe, a.k.a. The Queen of Free for uncovering this website for us.

Like many other households in America with young children living in them, our house is a Disney house. If the kids are awake and the TV’s are on, they’re usually tuned to The Disney Channel. We have a stack of Disney DVD’s that we regularly enjoy over and over.

With the summer approaching and school out of session, it will be time to keep the kids entertained and busy with their days ahead. In addition you can find resources for meals, coupons for saving money and a few resources for making a trip sometime over the summer break.

Disney Family was created to help parents with the most important job of their lives: raising their family in the best environment possible. We are committed to creating a nurturing, safe, and well-informed environment for guests and members to expand their parenting knowledge in a fun, entertaining way — just what you’d expect from one of the most trusted names in family entertainment.

The Disney Family.com website provides all of this information for you. It’s also part of a network of sites that provide more detail and content on specific topics that may interest you and your family.

• FamilyFun.com
• iParenting.com
• PregnancyToday.com
• CelebrityParents.com
• IncredibleBabyNames

Image: DisneyFamily.com website homepage

Here’s a quick tip for when you (or perhaps your kids) accidentally drop something down your sink. When you need to retrieve something like perhaps a piece of jewelry or just something else that shouldn’t be in the sink pipes, watch the video found at Family Hack.

Most of us have heard of Lifehacker, but the Family Hack site focuses the efforts to a little bit more of a targeted group of users. Those of us with kids and living in a home in the real world where our greatest act of increasing our productivity is to limit the amount of interruptions and challenges presented to us in area not directly related to our profession.

I’m absolutely adding this one to my RSS reader and will have to start scouring the archives to see other great posts I’ve already missed.

Image: Snagit of Family Hack website

It’s been a great summer this year. My family has ventured out into a new hobby and past time, camping! I’ve been camping a number of times through various times in my life from a kid, to college years and other times. My wife is NOT the camping type and it was my kids first time. I should now say that my wife WAS NOT the camping type, but now she really enjoys it.

I believe the key to camping though is really going with another family and close friends. Our first trip was with three other couples and their families and this past weekend was a weekend with just one of the couples again due to schedules.

Although we do stay in tents and in the “primitive camping” areas of state parks, I wouldn’t say we really “rough it”. We have some serious meals, breakfast being our favorite and that usually consists of biscuits, eggs, sausage & gravy, bacon and pancakes. We have a little battery powered ceiling fan in our tent, but it doesn’t circulate quite as much as I would like, but it does circulate. This weekend we also had our own hot-water shower. I’d say the worst part about our camping experience this summer is that we just did it in the summer, I don’t like being hot when I sleep and it was a little too warm at night for my enjoyment. I’m looking forward to the fall.

If this sounds like fun to you, just do a quick Google search on “camping for beginners” and you’ll get loads of resources. The one I’ve enjoyed the most has been from Road & Travel Magazine. With tips like what to pack, what to eat and what tent to buy, it’s really the basics that will make the difference on your trip. Sometimes the basics just don’t come to mind though, call it over-planning.

The article and website also has some links to other great sites of information:

• www.coleman.com/coleman/travel/
• www.YosemitePark.com
• www.nps.gov/parks.html
• www.nps.gov/yose
• www.nps.gov/seki
• www.coleman.com/coleman/ColemanCom/Fun.asp
• www.reserveusa.com
• www.recreation.gov
• http://reservations.nps.gov

In this age of adjusting to higher and higher gas prices, I’d also recommend checking out your local state’s resources. We’ve had great experiences at the two state parks we’ve visited so far and look forward to the ones will visit in the future as well.

Just received an e-mail about this Eat Smart Sweepstakes where you can win a chef prepared meal every day for a year.

Ready to get you and your family on the right track to eating better? Enter our sweepstakes now for a chance to have a year’s worth of carefully planned meals from Chef’s Diet^TM delivered to your door. That’s breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks delivered every day for an entire year– for the whole family!

Healthy or not, having the equivalent of my own personal chef for 3 meals and snacks a day for a year sounds pretty cool to me!

Uncover your personal chef and enter the sweepstakes today!

This past weekend I was able to enjoy a family reunion. It’s great seeing family members, aunts and uncles, cousins and extended cousins. At the reunion, many of us started sharing some of our history: who we are, who’s we are, where we’re at now, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. With all that information, wouldn’t it be interesting to develop an online family timeline.

And that leads me to this post. After some quick searches, I’ve found the following software and websites for developing a family album and family tree information online.

FamilyTreeGuide.com

TheFamilyPost.com

MyGreatBigFamily.com

MyFamily.com

I’m kind of surprised I didn’t find any Web2.0 site to fall into this genre. If anyone knows of something related to a family website and falls in that Web2.0 look and feel, let me know.