When I was pregnant with my first child, we bought one of those fancy-schmancy SLR digital cameras. It pretty much does all the work for us, and I love it. As long as we have it on one of the correct automatic settings for the given light conditions (i.e. set on the mountain or flower icon when we're outdoors, etc) it takes great pictures.
My stumbling block is how to stay on top of organizing all of these fantastic family photos. (BTW, this is one chore DH definitely ain't doing, and I can't say I blame him. He does all the grocery shopping and cooking, so I don't feel any major inequity.) Anyway, I know we need to print hard copies of the photos we want to save lest a computer malfunction cause us to lose everything - so I do that, and now have a crapload of 4x6's that probably need to go into books.
I'm also a big fan of occasionally getting professional photographs taken. "Natural light photography" and "photojournalistic-style photography" describes the style that I really like. The pictures have a timeless quality. However, I've noticed that members of the older generations in our family definitely prefer the traditional, posed photographs taken in a studio with the subjects sitting in front of a solid-color muslin panel or plain white background. And, if you head to a big box store, they are much cheaper to come by. So we do both. The photos hanging in frames at our house and in our offices are all the photojournalistic-style ones, and the photos hanging in frames at my parents' house and in their offices are all the traditional, posed ones. Go figure.
How are you photographing your family these days? Do you have a handle on saving photographs for posterity?
