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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I saw these 5 office etiquette rules at CBS Moneywatch, and they got me thinking about what rules would be on my list if I was the one to wield supreme executive power at the office. Then I realized: Since I work from home now (except when I’m traveling), I guess I do have the power to issue my own etiquette laws, after all. And so here they are: 5 rules to remember—regardless of where your office is.
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Things I’ve realized recently, in no particular order:

1. I actually like picking up the clutter and wiping down the tables when I volunteer in my youngest daughter’s kindergarten classroom. But I’m overwhelmed by the idea of doing it consistently in my own home.

2. I always thought I loved nightgowns, but I don’t. I like having them, and lounging around in them, but not sleeping in them.

3. Sometimes, I’m so focused on the daily minutiae of raising my kids — must make dinner, do laundry, dig up money for field trip, find inhaler, wrap birthday presents, set up playdates, get to soccer practice, etc. — that I forget that I’m supposed to be focused on the long-term — that is, teaching them how to navigate life.

4. I need to find a better way to manage my to-do list. I’ve been making “have-done” lists more than ever because my to-do lists make my eyes twitch, they’re so long and filled with impossible-to-do-in-a-day things.

5. Even though I work from home, I’m still scrambling at 5:30 to pick up the kids, clean up the house, and get dinner on the table at a decent hour. Why is that?

What have you realized about yourself lately?

We’ve been working on “restaurant manners” with our youngest kids (the teens and tween have it down pat by now), but even the most well-behaved kid can get bored while waiting for the food to arrive. Yes, you could always hand them your cell phone or pull out the video games, but sometimes, non-noisy and low-tech is the way to go.

In a pinch, almost anything that works well on a long car trip will keep your kids occupied in a restaurant — at least for a little while. I keep these five things in my car at all times, so that I’m ready for impromptu dinners out with my kids’ friends and their parents (which is pretty much the main way we all socialize these days). Even patrons at a kid-friendly pizza parlor deserve some peace and quiet while they eat.
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I’m usually very aware of the things I need to get done each day, and I’m usually very, very aware of the things on my to-do list that don’t get done by the end of the day. But there’s nothing like a severe bout of norovirus to show me how much I actually do get done each day—by preventing me from doing anything.
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I knew it was time to leave my last job when my boss told me that she didn’t believe that I was actually working on the days I worked from home.

I had been with the company for more than 15 years — a decade longer than she had, in fact — and had negotiated my one-day-a-week work-from-home schedule with her boss more than a year earlier. The deal was that I would take on a lot of extra work that wasn’t part of my job description in exchange for being allowed to telecommute once a week. To hear her say that flexibility was “a perk reserved for outstanding employees” and she wanted to “take it off the table” in order to better monitor my performance made me wonder: For parents who work outside of the home, is telecommuting a perk or a necessity? And how does taking away an employee’s flexibility encourage productivity?
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March is Women’s History Month, and earlier this week we marked the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. And by “marked” I mean “did our usual stuff and didn’t celebrate in any way,” in spite of the fact that International Women’s Day is an actual official holiday in many countries around the world.
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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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I wrote about this issue in 2008, when the New Jersey State Senate approved legislation that would grant employees paid maternity or dependent-care leave. Since then, not only has the situation not gotten better, it’s actually gotten worse: In a 2005 survey of 168 developed countries, the United States was one of just five that didn’t mandate paid maternity leave. Yesterday, a Human Rights Watch report; showed that, out of 190 countries studied, just three offered no legal guarantee of paid maternity leave: Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, and the United States. 
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