Berry Delicious: Planting a Backyard Berry Patch

It doesn’t really feel like summer until you’ve spent a warm morning in a u-pick field filling your belly and a bucket with ripe berries. But you don’t have to load the kids in the car and make a long drive to a farm outside of the city to enjoy that sweet satisfaction. Your family can have unlimite

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Summer Slowdown: How to Find a Calmer Pace With Kids

There’s little new about slow parenting, the style of parenting that calls for intentionally underprogramming your children.  Accordingly to slow parents (confession: I’m not entirely certain that’s what they call themselves), if you pare down extracurricular activities and after-school classes and

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Shake Up Summer Vacation: Four Ideas for Unusual Family Getaways

Have your summer vacation ideas gotten stale? From amusement parks to sandy beach resorts, you might feel as if your family has done it all. But have you milked a cow together? Or hooted for owls in the dead of night? If you strive to create family time together that is both relaxing and enriching

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South Sound Spring Arts Preview 2013

Get out your calendars! Banish cabin fever by attending some of the terrific spring arts dance, theater and music shows in the South Sound. (See also our Seattle-area spring arts preview, and if we missed something please email emurray@parentmap.com.) March 2–30, Tea for RubyEvergreen City Ballet i

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Snow, Sun, Storms: Four Getaways that Embrace the Best of Winter

With spring break still weeks away, you may be dreading the soggy, grey remaining weekends of our Puget Sound winter. Here’s a little antidote to the winter doldrums: don’t wait to escape winter, try embracing it. To plan your perfect getaway, first determine what your family would most enjoy right

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The Littlest Yogis: How Kids Are Mastering Meditation and Downward Dog

When my oldest daughter was in the first grade, I enrolled her in a yoga class, hoping it would be a wiggle-friendly way for my little perpetual motion machine to learn self-control. When I dropped her off, the classroom full of leaping children sounded like a herd of elephants. Forty-five minutes l

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Spring Arts Preview 2013: Dance, Theater, Music for Seattle Families

Get out your calendars! The Puget Sound is blessed with an unusual number of excellent arts organizations that serve families. To help you plan a smashing spring of arts, we've compiled this list of almost 100 shows, ranging from toe-tapping kindie rock concerts to one-of-a-kind dance performances.

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Bard for Families: Oregon Shakespeare Festival with Kids

If all the world’s a stage, what’s the trick to making a family theater experience more comedy than tragedy? Planning! The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in Ashland, Oregon, has long been a hot spot for theater buffs, but is also an increasingly popular destination for engaging kids in theater, t

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