With the focus on childhood obesity and the emphasis on healthy eating, it only makes sense to include your kids when it comes to planning out their meals. But, as all busy parents know, working through a recipe with a tiny helper can make the meal take twice as long (or longer) to prepare—that’s a difficult trade-off when you’re dealing with the witching hour.

A recent article in The New York Times suggested that bringing back home economics classes might be the key to controlling our nation’s obesity epidemic. And I think that’s a great idea.
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School is out in my town, and on her last day of Kindergarten my girl had a backpack full of precious papers. Not just her own drawings and worksheets and notebooks, but stuff her entire class had created together: Wall-size poems with six-inch-tall letters, spiral-bound storybooks illustrated by everyone. It’s a genius way to declutter the classroom at the end of the year, I grant you that. But as she proudly pulled paper after laminated paper out of her backpack, I began to wonder: What am I supposed to do with all this stuff?

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My daughter was humming a tune that sounded a lot like “Bingo” while she was drawing the other day. When I scooted closer to her on the couch to get a peek at what she was doing, I heard that she had made up new words to go along with the song:

There was a girl who worked a lot
and Lylah was her name-o
L-Y-L-A-H, L-Y-L-A-H, L-Y-L-A-H
and Lylah was her name-o!

The drawing was actually an illustrated guide to the song’s new lyrics (spelled phonetically, of course—she’s only in kindergarten). I thought I was doing a pretty good job of getting out of work mode and morphing into Mama mode during the window between school pick-up and bedtime. But apparently not.
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When my now 6-year-old daughter was a baby, my mom gave her a fuzzy cream-colored toy Easter bunny that my daughter, for whatever reason, named Minno.

Minno quickly became a permanent fixture in our lives, traveling with us to and from that hectic early-evening childcare hand-off my husband and I had, snuggling with our daughter at bedtime, even occupying the high chair with her.  I quickly realized that all hell would probably break loose when (not if) the bunny got lost, and decided to get a couple of identical backups. Which is when I discovered that the bunny had been discontinued a couple of years earlier.
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This week, people around the world were outraged by the story of a California mom who said that she injected her 8-year-old daughter with Botox to make her a contender on the child beauty pageant circuit.

In March 34-year-old Kerry Campbell,a  part-time aesthetician, was interviewed by U.K. tabloid newspaper The Sun about giving her 8-year-old daughter, Britney, body waxes and Botox.

“What I am doing for Britney now will help her become a star,” she told The Sun. ”I’m proud Britney is getting to have these beauty treatments at such a young age. I wish that I’d had the same advantages when I was younger.”
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My youngest two kids have entered The Age of Soccer Practice and Games Every Weekend Rain or Shine, and suddenly, my schedule looks like three people’s calendars got melded together in a horrible laboratory experiment a la “The Fly.”

The irony is that three years ago I wrote this:

On the one hand, I’m all for kids having plenty opportunities to learn and grow and do things that have captured their interest, but I’m talking about a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old here. They’re in preschool and daycare while my husband and I work full-time, and, honestly, we’re so busy during the week that it’s kind of a relief to not have extracurricular commitments on the weekends. But, on the other hand… am I depriving my kids?

Whoa, times have changed.
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My youngest kids have discovered the value of money and, since I’ve been trying to instill in them the value of earning money, rather than just receiving money, right now they’re all about doing random chores for a quarter.

“Mama, can I earn some monies?” my 4-year-old son asks, dish rag in hand just in case I say yes.

“I made my bed this morning! All by myself! Without anyone telling me to!” chirps my 6-year-old daughter. “Is that worth a quarter? Or is it worth two quarters?”

I’m thinking they may be ready to start getting an allowance, even if they’re too young to have anything to spend it on. But while I contemplate how often and how much, I’ve noticed that I’m starting offer up a quarter here or there in exchange for, well, a minute or two of peace.
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After watching this “60 Minutes Overtime” interview with CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan — who was beaten and sexually assaulted in Cairo last week, prompting some media executives to consider pulling their female reporters out of Egypt — I’m struck by one observation she shares.

In the interview, which aired in September 2010, the 39-year-old journalist describes coming under fire while with US troops in Afghanistan. “I ran for cover. Usually, I would run for the cameraman,” she says. “But once you have two little babies at home, you have a little different perspective on things.”

As working moms, we’re all too aware of how other people may (or may not) perceive us once we become parents. Studies show that the age-old gender gap has been replaced by the motherhood penalty. Some companies woo parents with work-life balance-improving benefits and then penalize employees for using them. We worry that we’re seen as slackers if we have to dash out of work to pick up a sick child, or if we can’t stay late to work on an important project.

But what we don’t often talk about is whether our feelings about our jobs change when we have kids. Not whether we’d rather work from home (or go into an office) or whether we want to downshift from full time to part time or opt out of the workforce entirely. I mean how becoming a parent can influence the work we do, and the risks we’re willing to take while doing it.

So, let’s talk. Did you view your job differently once you became a parent? What do you do, and how did your perspective change?

Photo: CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan in Iraq (Photo from CBS News)

I’ve got two teenage stepdaughters who are breathtakingly gorgeous, and a sweet 6-year-old daughter who looks up to them in every way possible. The clothes they wear, the makeup they dab on, the way they straighten their hair or leave it curly and wild — she makes mental notes about all of it, and those notes come together in her little head like pieces of a gigantic puzzle. The “this is what you are supposed to do when you are big” puzzle. The “this is what is appropriate” puzzle. Whether the big kids like it or not (and there have been times when they don’t), they are their little siblings’ role models.

It’s probably why pop-culture stuff like this throws me for a loop. I mean, seriously. I know that Jersey Shore is a guilty pleasure for a lot of people. But to let your 11-year-old be made over in Snooki’s image? By Snooki herself?

W. T. F. ?
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I went to pick my little kids up from preschool the other day, and when I got there I found my 4-year-old son curled up in a small ball on his caregiver’s lap.

The backstory: He and his buddies had been playing (probably superheroes, their current obsession), and playing escalated into rough housing, which escalated into arguing, which escalated into fighting. One friend grabbed a toy out of my boy’s hands; another defended the first, and that was just too much for my little guy to bear. He burst into tears — a common enough occurrence at home, but a rarity at school — and, since I wasn’t there, climbed into his teacher’s lap for reassurance.

I got there about half an hour later, and there he was, all cuddled up. And, instead of feeling protective or territorial or jealous, instead of feeling guilty for not being there when it all happened, or angry that his feelings had been hurt, I just felt… grateful.
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