It's been a scorcher this week, but you can stay cool with a fun-filled family weekend of fairs, fairies and felines here in New Jersey. There's the Passaic County Fair in Woodland Park, the (yum!) State Ice Cream Festival in Toms River, the Cat Expo in Somerset, an Open House at the Watchung Stables and a Fairy Festival in Pennington to keep your crew entertained. Read on for all our top picks and remember, you can find a listing of all NJ activities for kids in our Event Calendar.

If your family enjoys music, dance or art, there are so many great events to choose from this weekend. Dance lovers will enjoy a free performance by the Connecticut Ballet Dance Caravan at the WCSU campus on Friday night.  Your budding performer will not only watch the performance but will have an opportunity to dance with the ballet troupe following the show.

Captain Kidd hid his treasure somewhere around Gardiners Bay, and modern-day treasures are still being hidden all across Long Island and indeed all around the world. Welcome to the game of geocaching, a modern-day treasure hunt where players hide and seek cached containers using GPS-enabled devices like smartphones or GPS navigators. There are almost certainly caches hidden in your neighborhood, probably more than one! And if your children are Scouts, they can even win a merit badge for hunting them.

For this edition of my series of special needs posts, I'm taking a look at sports programs for children with special needs. As the mother of a son with autism, I am consistently amazed by the ingenuity of parents, teachers, therapists and sports enthusiasts who manage to adapt traditional athletic activities to accommodate kids like him.

I've seen firsthand how hard it can be for kids with special needs to engage in sports. For my 10-year-old son Jake, sports present unique challenges. Like many kids on the autism spectrum, he requires one-on-one support to remain on task and to manage frustration. The programs below are some of our favorites, and I've added a few we're looking forward to trying. While some of the organizations offer drop-in or one-off sessions, keep in mind that advance registration is often required.

If there's one city in the world that deserves more Shakespeare in the park than any other, surely it's ours. Oh, yes, London may be Shakespeare's 'hood, and New York has that awfully famous park, but we've got something infinitely more important: the weather. No need to suffer for our art here; when Angelenos see theater al fresco on a summer evening it is a pure delight - it is, in fact, As You Like It.

On Saturday I spoke at the Apple Store in SoHo about the best apps for family Travel. All this week I'll be posting my suggested apps plus more tips and technology for family travel including the best apps for family road trips, how to find the best places to eat and things to do at your destination and keeping the kids engaged in your trip. In today's post I share my best strategies and tools for getting the best prices on airfares and finding inexpensive car rentals and accommodations. 

The most stressful part of planning a family vacation, in my opinion, is booking the flights. No matter how you slice it, flying with a family is expensive and biting the bullet to buy those pricey tickets can be hard. Plus you're always wondering if the price might go down, or if you don't buy now will the prices go up.

Luckily there are a lot of apps that can help make this process easier, alerting you when fares come down and even helping you get refunds if ticket prices go down after you purchase. Read on for apps that help you save money on airfares and accommodations:

A hard core mountaineer I am not. Nope…I’m more of a leisurely loper, quick to stop for snacks, water breaks, and bathrooms. But that being said, I do love getting out on a trail, and I love getting my kids out there as well, in hopes that they will grow up to be better mountaineers than their mother…

To that end, we will be hitting several manageable hiking trails in and around Fairfield County this summer and fall. Hiking Tip: best to wear long pants tucked into socks or tick spray and to bring water and a snack for when it's time to take a rest. Here’s our list of family friendly trails – hope to see you out there! If you'd like to spread your wings a bit further afield, check out these family friendly hikes in the Hartford area.