Cheekwood Botanical Gardens in Nashville, TN is one of my all-time favorite places in Nashville – with or without kids. We’ve been for family events, date nights, after school to do homework outside, and I even go to walk and read in the gardens solo every once in a while. We frequently bring visiting friends…
Chattanooga, Tennessee is one of my family’s favorite southern towns. It is just a couple hours from our hometown of Nashville – but also a short drive from Atlanta, Birmingham, and Knoxville and combines small-town amenities, such as walkability, a vibrant art scene and easy navigation with big-city attractions like the incredible Tennessee Aquarium and…
This summer my husband and I hosted a family reunion at our family farm in East Tennessee with his extended family. My husband’s family gets together every summer at various alternating locations, but this was the first time we hosted the family reunion in Tennessee. Previously, we’ve gone to the beach, to Disney in Orlando,…
My friend Regine does this incredible thing with her family where she takes them to a Spanish speaking country every summer for a month to vacation, travel and attend Spanish school to work on their language skills. Regine works remotely most of the month and when her husband joins them for at least a week,…
I grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee and it was somewhat of a right of passage to visit the Dollywood Theme Park in Pigeon Forge, at the base of The Great Smoky Mountains National Park growing up. Country Legend, Dolly Parton put her name on the theme park in the late eighties (previously it was called Silver…
My friend Allyson recently traveled around Portugal with her husband (while there 3 girls stayed home with their grandparents) and they fell in love with Porto. Porto is the second largest city in Portugal (after Lisbon where my family briefly visited last January) and the city is situated along the coast in northwest Portugal. Porto, Portugal…
One of my favorite things to do with my girls – especially during the summer – is an ice cream crawl. Several years ago, my girls and I planned our first annual ice cream crawl in our hometown of Nashville. If you’ve never heard of an ice cream crawl it consists of visiting a new…
It is birthday season in our house these days – my oldest turned 12 last week, my youngest will celebrate another year around the sun on Sunday and we will fete my middle a couple weeks later. All three of our girls have birthdays within a month of each other followed by my husband in…
By Stephanie Becker We live in Nashville where the options for free family fun are plentiful, indeed, and especially during the summer months. Our family of 5 has so many awesome things going on this summer: pool, Little League tournaments, a visit with my Mom complete with muraling through Nashville, beach trips… but we’ve only…
My mom grew up in Southern Louisiana and so we have always had a lot of Cajun and Louisiana food influences in our home – my brothers and I can all peel blue crab with ease and precision attaining large chunks of meat in quick time, we can pinch the tail and suck the head…