Don't bug me

The big health news this summer, here in the New York metropolitan area, is mosquitos. And not just any mosquitos: mosquitos who are carrying the West Nile virus, that staple of nightly newscasts and inspirer of public panic. The virus is transported from infected crows to humans by those little needle-nose nuisances, and can cause encephalitis. Or not. Though seven people died after being infected last year and 62 more were sickened, most of those bitten will just experience a bad case of the blahs (and just how would I distinguish these from my normal everyday blahs?). It's a serious health hazard for the elderly, the weak, and the immune-system-impaired. For everybody else, the itching is probably worse.

Yet of course, since there's no news like scary news, all we hear and read is DEADLY VIRUS and PUBLIC HEALTH RISK and MUST SPRAY POISON! That poison would be malathion, which is something of a public health risk all by itself. Still, we can't be having no virus-carrying mosquitos flying around, so some counties are choosing airborne chemicals as a lesser evil. At the very least, residents are being advised to take major precautions: No standing water in your yard! No going outside without your own personal chemicals liberally applied! No going outside with any skin exposed, even if it's chemical-coated! No going outside in the evening at all!

Now, personally, I'm more afraid of a Lyme-disease-filled deer tick than a West Nile-virus-bearing mosquito, though I'll be happy to steer clear of both. And that's where I'm finding some small compensation in this whole thing. I've never much liked the outdoors. I've entered it grudgingly. When my children insist on playing outside, I stall them as long as I can. Can't let them go out by themselves, of course--between their developmental delays and judgment problems and the predatory strangers one hears about on nightly newcasts when there's no mosquito news, I watch those kiddos like a hawk. But I can whine and complain and delay and cut their outings short for arbitrary reasons. And I do.

Previously, this has made me a bad mom who for her own selfish reasons will not allow her children to frolic in the great and health-filled outdoors. Now, though, I'm a good and alert mom who is keeping her children safe from danger. Really, if you subtract the hours of the day you're advised not to let children outside because they could get sunburned, and then subtract the hours of the day you're advised not to let children outside because of mosquitos, there's only about five minutes in the early morning and five minutes in the late afternoon that are safe. By the time you slather on the sunscreen and bug repellant, that five minutes is gone. Can't put out a little backyard swimming pool, because mosquitos will lay eggs in it. Can't go hiking, because there are deer ticks out there. Can't leave toys in the yard, because the insecticide sprays will collect on them. Can't go outside when it's hot, because the clothes you have to wear to block out the sun and the bugs will give you heat stroke. Why not just stay inside, in the air-conditioned house?

And if that makes you just feel blah--well, see? You've already been infected!

Now cut that out!

Are "today's parents" trying too hard or not hard enough? That's the question that keeps parenting books filling up, and flying off of, bookstore shelves. From the virtual shelves of Amazon.com, here are two new tomes that exhort us to do more, do less, do different. I haven't read them--heck, I'm still just halfway through Stanley Greenspan's The Challenging Child, which I bought months ago, and I have a stack of such scintillating titles as Assessment of Communication and Language, Teaching Children With Autism, and Reaching Out to Children With FAS/FAE waiting for me when I'm done. No mere garden-variety parenting problems for me! But if you're not rushing out to buy these titles, then you must be a bad parent. Or so their publishers would have you believe...

Taking the "try harder!" tack is How to Behave So Your Children Will, Too! by the aptly named Sal Severe. Does your child throw wild, humiliating tantrums in public places? Maybe it's not his behavior you should be worrying about. Severe's take is that it's your behavior that causes junior to act up--your inconsistency, your ineffective disciplinary techniques, your willingness to give in to get a little peace. As Amazon's review explains: "Solidly putting the responsibility for a child's behavior on the parents, "How to Behave" addresses a wide range of issues, such as how children learn to push their parents' buttons, why children misbehave, and how to motivate kids to behave using simple rules and consequences. Push aside all the nitty-gritty advice, however, and several themes emerge. Over and over, Severe emphasizes that raising a child requires total parental consistency, that it takes awhile to get results from new parenting techniques, and that overall, parenting is a very tough job." Well, thanks. It's nice of someone to say so. Especially someone bent on making it tougher still.

But does it really have to be so tough? From the "don't try so hard!" school of thought comes Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard? by Alvin A. Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise. What the two are specifically targeting is the overabundance of activities parents run their kids (and themselves) through in an effort to provide a rich, varied, and full childhood experience. Bad parents! Says Amazon: "If you've just sat down after a day that included taking your very intelligent child to a Kumon math tutoring session, shuttling another to soccer practice and piano lessons, supervising the homework of both to make sure it's perfect, and making a midnight trip to the grocery store to pick up the organic grapes for tomorrow's nutritionally balanced lunches, then "Hyper-Parenting" is for you.... This parenting style can be loosely defined as one that attempts to control everything in a child's environment with the aim of achieving a perfect outcome. It's not realistic or healthy, say the authors. Chapter by chapter, examining everything from parents' reliance on "expert" opinions to the huge impact of media messages on parent behavior, Rosenfeld and Wise make a compelling argument for their premise. They encourage parents to turn the lens inward and ask themselves what messages they are sending--not with their words, but with their behavior." Personally, I think that teaching children how to juggle a full schedule of activities is probably about as valuable a skill as anything, and teaching them that the best way to handle their lives is by reading a book (particularly one that then tells you not to listen to experts) is somewhat less productive. But then again, I've carefully perfected a hypo-parenting style by which I park the kids in front of the TV for endless hours of Nickelodeon so that I have plenty of time to sleep, answer e-mail, and read parenting books.

Hey, it works for me.

Ill-conceived conversation

What is it about women getting together that forces them to talk about childbirth? Seems every time I go to a wedding shower or a baby shower or just a party where the women congregate in the kitchen, the conversation invariably veers toward pregnancy and labor and all their attendant discomforts. The mommies-to-be and the moms-that-have-been compare notes on who had the worst morning sickness, or the largest weight gain, or the most uncomfortable weather, or the least competent spouse. Sometimes someone will hold forth with a long involved story of delivery difficulty that everyone has heard before but listens to admiringly again.

At such times, I might as well just fade into the woodwork, or fall through the floor, for all the contribution I’m going to make to the conversation. As an adoptive parent and someone who never got very far with fertility treatments, I don’t begrudge fertile folks their ability to bear children, but sheesh, do I have to hear about it all the time? I’m usually not the only one falling silent—there’s usually an unmarried woman or a married woman who hasn’t had kids yet in the crowd, and we stand there like children listening to their father tell war stories, waiting for it to be over so we can go play.

You'd think that it might occur to someone that childless people in the room might be uncomfortable with all this talk. But then again, I suppose I blather on about my kids without considering whether people might be uncomfortable with that. Now, of course, my kids are wonderful and endlessly fascinating and who wouldn't want to know their every move? I suppose, though, that for someone having trouble having children, hearing about childish exploits might be as saddening as hearing about childbearing ones.

So maybe we should all just start talking about the weather. Or maybe I should just stop being so sensitive. In truth, there is one good thing about listening to endless stories about epidurals and episiotomies: They make me appreciate adoption all the more. I mean, we had a miserable time in Russia, and got stuck there far longer than we anticipated, but in the end, it was only a month, and I think I might have actually lost weight. No surgery, no hospitilization, no morning sickness (though the food did sometimes make me a little nauseated). And through it all, my husband was suffering just as much as I. Clearly these pregnant people are going about it all wrong, and next time I hear them go on I shall just sit back and gloat. Give me my kids ready-made, you bet.

Presidential psychology

Want your kid to grow up to be president? He or she won't have to run against one of mine; since they were born in Russia, they're ineligible, at least under current law. And given the reputation-scarring, gray-hair-inducing, crucible of fire the presidency has become of late, it's hard to know why anyone would wish that on their offspring. A White House staffer who could quit and write a best-selling book, maybe. But president? Why not something a little safer, like snake handling or fire-fighting?

Still, if you have second-generation political aspirations, a team of psychologists has helpfully outlined the traits that great presidents have had in common, as well as those shared by their less-than-effective brethren. The losers tended to have qualities that would make for great neighbors, but didn't do much for their leadership potential. Here's what to start teaching your children well:

GREAT TRAITS

Presidential pros like Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and JFK tended to be:
* Smart
* Energetic
* Assertive
* Concerned about others
* Open to experience
* Extroverted
* Constantly striving for achievement
* Broadly capable
* Disorganized
* Disagreeable
* Not above tricking, cajoling, bullying, or lying

LOSING QUALITIES

So-so chief execs like Grant, Harding, Taft, and Coolidge were found to be:
* Agreeable
* Straightforward
* Likable
* Tidy
* Cooperative
* Easily led
* Innocent
* Pleasant
* Passive

So the next time Junior says he cleaned his room when he really didn't, or sneaks off to do some new thing you've forbidden, or insists on his own way, or talks back, don't punish him--get that boy a campaign manager. He's presidential timber.

We're back

I report back to you from the land of airplane travel that yes, it is still possible to go to an airport, get on a plane, and arrive at your destination in a reasonable period of time. This is news because on every channel, in every paper, you'll read about people who have not had such luck. Everywhere are reports about delays, canceled flights, people trapped in terminals, people trapped on runways, disgruntled pilots, deceptive airline personnel, dejected passengers. And yet my little family managed to sneak through without incident.

Of course, most of the bad reports have been about United, and we were flying American. This was just dumb luck, because I wasn't thinking about pilot strikes and mechanic strikes when I made the reservations. American's crews are apparently happy campers, and not prone to leaving customers stranded and steaming, and for that I thank them. Now, on the return flight, they did arrive at the airport late enough to bump our departure time by a half-hour, but arrive they did, and the pilot politely made up most of that time in the air. No complaint from me; hey, I'm late to work all the time.

It may also have helped that we were on non-stop flights between Newark and Los Angeles, with no time whatsoever in Chicago. The Windy City appears to be the root of all airline evil these days. People speak of it in hushed tones. "If it's bad in Chicago, it's bad everywhere," a steward told a passenger, shaking his head in rueful amazement. Things must have been happy at O'Hare the last two Saturdays, because badness did not trickle down.

Well, there was a little badness, but it wasn't schedule-related. It was seat-assignment related, and it was just stupid. Why, do you suppose, would they scatter a party of four, with two children, all around the cabin? We gave the children's ages when we made the reservation; doesn't that information reside somewhere? On our flight out to L.A., we were assigned two seats together, another seat seven rows away, and the last seat seven rows farther still. On the way back, we had three seats together--but one was across the aisle from the other two. Now, I have one highly hyperactive seven-year-old who requires constant supervision, and one quiet 10-year-old who will throw up if she doesn't have her head in my lap for most of the flight. Which of my unaccompanied children would you like to sit next to?

In both cases, the nice lady at the gate was able to switch things around to at least give us two-and-two. Going out, those two-and-two were many rows apart, giving me a long peaceful ride with my mostly sleeping (and mercifully not vomiting) daughter and my husband a long lively ride with my mostly not sleeping son. Going back, we had the best arrangement possible: Two-and-two, with my son and husband directly behind my daughter and I. Or, more specific, my son right behind me, so that we did not have to yell at him for five hours to STOP KICKING THE SEAT. It is impossible to get him to stop kicking the seat in front of him because his feet don't reach the ground, and his knees don't reach the end of the seat to bend, and in the super-spacious coach section the seat in front of him is about an inch away, and his feet have to be somewhere. It is impossible, but people expect you to try. The best I can usually do is take his shoes off so it's at least a softer kick.

My advice, then, for people traveling with children, is to sit short kicking kids behind one of their parents, or at least behind a stranger who is a parent and knows that there are much worse things a kid could be doing. Arrive at the airport two hours early so that your children can actually be seated with you (I know you are thinking that being seated away from your children would make for a much nicer flight, but think of your legal liability toward the other passengers). And most important of all: Stay the heck away from Chicago.

Is it Fall yet?

One more month of summer before school starts. One more month. Thirtysomething days. Four long weeks. A short time, and yet an eternity. It will fly by, I know it will fly by. But will it be quick enough to keep me from suffering kid overload?

The summer so far has been manageable, barely. We've had our big month o' camps--two weeks of church camp for both kids, then one week of basketball camp and one week of our city-run camp for my daughter, four weeks of special-needs camp for my son. After today, there's no more camp of any sort. We're camp-free. Just hangin' out at home. Relaxin'. Havin' fun. Playin' games. Buggin' mom.

My daughter has actually been home-bound for these last two weeks, and we've survived. Of course, she's easy--if there's a TV set with Nickelodeon on hand, she can amuse herself for hours. These past weeks she's broadened her show selection, adding Regis's and Rosie's morning shows. A "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" fan, she often declares her deep and abiding love for Mr. Philbin and her intention to marry him. Finding out that he had a morning show, too, was a treat. Seeing him co-hosting with his wife this week may upset her plans, but she's enjoyed watching her Regis all the same. And Rosie is "so cute." I've made sure the TV got switched to kiddie fare before "The View," though, 'cause they discuss things there I don't want her to, well, view. Then again, maybe I should save myself the trouble; she's been spending more and more time downstairs with Grandma watching soap operas, and we all know how discrete and chaste those programs are.

It keeps her busy, anyway. But from here on in, it gets complicated. Next week we go on vacation, which will be a week of relaxation surrounded by two extremely stressful, overly long airplane rides. When we get back, it's straight into three weeks of under-occupied children, and though my daughter just wants to watch, my son will want to play. Play outside, play with me in his room, play Candyland, play recycling with odd objects from around the house, play with the newspapers by distributing them all over the floor, play with the beanbag chairs by dropping them down the stairs, play with the drawers and doors by opening and shutting them over and over, play with his skin by picking off scabs, play, play, play, play, play.

Where do you go to get that year-around school, anyway?

Bed head

Here's the kind of news to drive a conscientious parent nutty: Putting infants to sleep on their backs, as is now the conventional wisdom to prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, can leave them with flat heads. Not flat hair--a flat head. We're talking a plane from the nape of the neck to the top of the noggin.

The problem appears to be the extreme malleability of the newborn skull; like anything else soft, if you place it agains a flat surface for long periods of time, it will take on a flat surface itself. This is okay if you're talking about, say, a ball of Play-Doh, but not so cool when it's your baby's head. Remedies for this radical form of bed head range from making the child wear a plastic helmet to reform the skull (yowch!) to plastic surgery to reshape the head and reposition the ears, which sometimes end up skewed.

If all this makes you want to plop baby back on his or her stomach, the American Academy of Pediatrics says--Don't! A little skull rearrangement is a small price to pay for stayin' alive, and that organization is so proud of the decrease in SIDS since it started recommending back-sleeping that they're willing to risk some deformities. They do recommend moving baby's head from time to time, presumably to get a nice faceted effect instead of one big flat surface.

But here's the thing: You can go along being a good parent, following the pediatrician's orders, observing the latest advice, doing everything you can to keep your baby safe, and still end up disfiguring the kid. How on earth do parents of infants keep from being complete nervous wrecks? If you ask me, this is just another good reason for bypassing infancy altogether and adopting children who are well past the newborn stage. Their heads may be small, but at least they're round.

Pity party

On Sunday, we went to a party that I really didn’t want to go to. Truly, desperately, deeply dreaded. I said I didn’t want to go when we got the invitation. I said I didn’t want to go when the RSVP time rolled around. I whined about going right up until the time we left, at which point I threw a major embarrassing screaming tear-filled tantrum. And still, we went.

It was a graduation party for a relative of my husband’s I don’t know. The graduate’s mother, one of my husband’s five million or so cousins, I could pick out of a line-up if I had to. There were some cousins I knew, many many cousins I didn’t, lots of kids, lots of noise, lots of food, lots of mess, lots of cars, lots of distractions, lots of stuff not to touch, lots of disruptions. Which is why I didn’t want to go. Or why, more specifically, I didn’t want to bring my son.

One of the things I’ve always tried to do with my active, distractible, impulsive, sensory-integration-disordered boy is to control the environments I put him in. Short, specific trips with specific intended outcomes. Trip to the mall for an in-and-out visit to the toy store, yes. Trip to the mall to stand in line for an hour to see some loser in a Disney-character costume, no. Party close by with people we know and a clear escape route, yes. Party two hours away with strangers and an equally endless ride home, no.

I want my son to have as normal a life as possible, but I also know that when he’s put in a position where he can’t behave, he won’t behave. Sometimes, there’s not an option: Church, for example, is a nonnegotiable part of our week, and even though it is a sensory and behavioral disaster for our youngest family member, there’s never a question of not going. But a party—a party too far away—a party with too many relatives—a party that made me exhausted just thinking about it—that party, surely, we could skip.

Especially when it was raining the morning of the party, which was supposed to be a pool party. Especially when my son started coughing and seemed tired and out of it and vaguely pre-cold all morning. Especially when I had a stressful week at work. Especially when I went to all the trouble of throwing a tantrum. But my husband—whose policy in all such events is just to ignore emotional outbursts and keep moving forward in the belief that things will just work themselves out without our help—just kept putting people in the car. And so, we went, with me sulking and sniffling and predicting bad behavior and bad health all the way.

So of course, it wasn’t so bad.

The party was mostly indoors, very crowded and very loud, which instantly put my son into hyperdrive. But his dad took him outside, and walked around looking at cars, and then walked around looking at cars some more, and then gave him some food, and then walked around looking at more cars. They were at the party, in that they were in the same town and on the same block, but out of the four hours we were there father and son were on party premises for about one.

During that one hour, the small boy asked everybody, but everybody, for their keys. Old people, middle-aged people, young people, teenagers, everyone got hit up for their keys. That’s his thing—his party parlor trick—looking at people’s keys and telling them what kind of cars they have. Sometimes people find a small boy sticking his hands in their pockets annoying. Sometimes people find it cute. In this gathering, the latter outnumbered the former, though maybe they were just being polite. At any rate, he looked at a lot of keys and conned a few people into actually letting him in their cars to play.

He didn’t melt down. He didn’t break anything. He didn’t have a screaming fit, or cause one of his parents to have one (though actually, I’d already had one, hadn’t I?) It was, all in all, a successful day. Which is a triumph of sorts for him, coming at a time when he’s had lots of experiences in which people felt he was just the worst little boy on earth. And my appreciation of this is only slightly dampened by the fact that I behaved badly for nothing.

Although I still think it wasn’t necessary. And if he does get a cold, I'll know what to blame it on.

Ouch!

It's summer, time for kids to run and play, jump and climb, ride and romp and slip and fall. Which means, in our house, it's flesh-wound season.

Yes, there's something about warm weather and exposed skin that leads directly to bloodied knees and raw elbows. It is comforting to know that this is one area in which my children are blissfully normal. I remember having my share of skinned knees as a kid, and I didn't have low muscle tone or Sensory Integration Disorder or poor depth perception to blame it on. I was just a klutz. This year, however, my kiddos seem particularly intent on making the antisceptic and band-aid industries very healthy indeed.

We started the summer with a decidedly otherwordly blister on my daughter's thumb. This turned into many blisters, then into many puss-filled grotesqueries that necessitated a lot of painful whining, then into lots of loose flappy skin. She'd had similar yucky business two summers before, so apparently this is an every-other-summer sort of thing. Every other millennium would be too soon for me.

That wound was still in the band-aid cover-up stage when my basketball-camp-going girl suffered what might have been a career ending injury: a traumatic blow to the pinkie. Oh, the agony. She was sure it was broken. We were sure it was bruised. It sure did get black and blue and puffy. Showing her mettle for future professional athletics, she did manage to finish out her time at camp, dribbling in a particularly gingerly fashion, no doubt. She is now proudly able to bend it completely without screaming once again, so no harm done.

Then we have my son, who is racking up the injuries with each new day at camp. He must always fall to the left, because he has two separate skinned spots on his left knee and two more on his left elbow. These are in a constant state of regeneration because he is in a constant state of scab-picking. Here again, a resoundingly normal activity for a small boy, but the extremely expensive special-needs camp would like us to tell him to cut it out all the same. We cover the owies with bandaids, he peels the bandaids off, then peels off what's underneath. It's a regular science experiment. Threats of infection do not concern him; more research!

Today we added to the collection a mark on my son's shoulder-blade that looks like an abrasion to me and a bruise to my husband, and a small cut just below my daughter's nose from where her baby cousin through her Gameboy at her. The Gameboy, I hasten to report, is just fine. But if it wasn't, we'd have had more than enough band-aids to patch it back up.

Licorice is for losers

Need to slim down? Break out the Twizzlers.

According to a recent study by the University of Padua in Italy, a half a licorice stick a day reduces body fat. That's right, candy can make you thin.

Of course, it's not that easy. It's never that easy. The licorice reduced the body fat in the test subjects, but also increased their water retention, for a net weight change of zero. Researchers posit that eating less salt while eating more licorice might result in actual weight loss. So eat the licorice, but leave the potato chips and peanuts in the vending machine.

Can licorice-flavor SlimFast be far behind? Weight Watchers-brand licorice whips? Jenny Craig Good 'n Plenty? Who knew the chew had such magical properties? And here I was eating it just because it tastes good. How long before packages of Twizzlers bear a banner reading "Cuts Body Fat!"? The candy already comes emblazoned with the fact that it's low in fat. Low in fat, and makes you low in fat, too! Talk about your perfect foods.

Well, maybe not perfect. As with every diet aide, there's something a little dangerous about licorice. It may reduce fat in small quantities, but in large quantities, it raises blood pressure. So you've got to use it responsibly. Don't eat your weight in the stuff. Don't expect miracles. And don't position a piece of black licorice in your mouth so it looks like you've lost a tooth.

Personally, I'm holding out for the study that says chocolate is good for you. At least, I'd like to participate in it.

Attention deficit

There's nothing that makes a child need his mama like his mama needing to do something else.

My son can usually play independently with very little input. He loves to roam the house looking for items to "recycle," which basically means putting them into plastic bags and carrying them to another part of the house. At any given time, a quarter of our household junk is being "recycled." This game requires very little parental input...unless, of course, the parents are busy. Then, it's time to go to the recycling center, and he needs company. He's going to have a garage sale, and he needs customers. He needs to load his recycling truck, he needs to unload his recycling truck. He needs attention, and he needs it now.

I've long ago discovered the magnetic power of the telephone. Children can be scattered to all corners of the house, happily absorbed in their toy cars or their TV shows or their Gameboys, but when the signal goes out that Mom is talking on the phone, they're suddenly and irresistibly drawn to her compass point, with deeply important requests like, "Can I have a piece of candy?" "Can I go to the bathroom?" "Can we go to Toys R Us later?" "Can I crawl in your lap and wrap the phone cord around me until the phone falls on the floor?" If I'm talking to someone from work, my son is liable to just go ahead and take that lap space without consulting me.

Now, I have about the best possible work situation you can have and still be working. I telecommute three days a week and go into the office two. I do this because I want to have as much time as possible home with the kids, infuriating as that time may sometimes be. But as many times as I have told my children how lucky they are to have me home so much, and how other kids' mommies have to go to work every day, they still see work as an unforgivable encroachment on my time, which should be naturally totally 100 percent devoted to their interest and amusement. My daughter keeps saying, "Just tell your boss you don't want to work now." She even gave me a drawing of herself saying how much she loves me, with the words "Show this to your boss" down the side. I hung it up over my desk. As yet, it has not led my boss to cut me any slack.

Not this weekend, anyway, which was spent working way, way overtime on a way, way under-progressed project. And so of course, my son was clingy in a way far more extreme than usual, constantly begging me to play with him, with ascending degrees of neediness and an astounding capacity for guilt-wielding. I think I may have spent more time with him this hectic, deadline-plagued weekend than I usually do in a normal weekend, just because he was so demanding and so whiney and so in my face. And did I mention guilt?

Of course, if I ever did really quit, and was home all day with nothing to do but nurture, I feel certain that the two of them would want nothing whatever to do with me. The unattainable is always more interesting.

Harry who?

Everybody's wild about Harry. Pick up a magazine, tune in a news show, stop by Amazon.com, and you're likely to see that bespectacled face peering back, accompanied by reports of record sales and unprecedented interest and children lined up around the block to buy a 700-page book. All of these stories mention at some point that anybody who's never heard of Harry Potter must be living under a rock.

Which makes our house Rock Central.

"Who's Harry Potter?" asked my husband when he saw the name emblazoned in a banner on my issue of "Entertainment Weekly." Never heard of the character, never heard of the books, never been touched by the media blitz. But surely the kids have heard of it--I know my daughter's classmates were requesting it in the library, and I've seen endless photos of children her age dressed up in Potter-esque costumes attending bookstore events. But nope. In an informal survey, two out of two of the children living in my home have never heard of the junior wizard. Does the hype machine know about this? It's missed two!

Not surprising, really. As with so many things, we're a little delayed in pop culture skills hereabouts. My 10- and 7-year-olds are still watching "Barney." They can easily watch the whole Nick Jr. lineup without flinching. Since my daughter's been in a mainstream classroom this past year, she's started to get a clue about what she should be liking, but not precisely why. She professes great enthusiasm for Pokemon, but can't tell you any more about it besides the fact that she looooooves Pikachu. She claims to adore Backstreet Boys and Brittany Speers, but rarely plays the music. She does play with her Gameboy regularly, but isn't obsessed with getting new games or new gizmos. She's got the form of fandom, but not the content.

Still, I might have expected her to at least ask to buy the Harry Potter books, even if they'd sit about gathering dust. But then, books are somewhat beneath her radar at the moment. Although she has the mechanics of reading down pat, she's missing the comprehension, the enthusiasm, and the enjoyment. Because she doesn't process words well, she needs to read very slowly, and I don't even want to think about what that would mean with books as thick and detailed as the Potters. Limited vocabulary and limited understanding of abstractions would also be a problem. I'm hoping to read the very slender "Sarah, Plain and Tall" with her this summer, and even that may be too ambitious.

At any rate, the big magical adventure we'll embark on this month will be on the computer, not between the covers. In an attempt to speed up her word-processing abilities, we'll be trying out the Fast Forword program over the next six weeks. The idea is to train the brain to handle sounds faster, in the hope that this will cause faster understanding of words and ideas. There are reports of children gaining a year or more in language development in 30 days. I've had too many disappointments to believe in that sort of quick fix, but I'd be happy if she could just get from the beginning to the end of a sentence without losing her way.

And if she happens to pick up a desire to read books--700 page books or 70 page ones, whatever--so much the better.

Sudden death

It's long been apparent that American parents have a perspective problem when it comes to kids and sports. We hardly needed someone to die to drive that particular point home. But that's what happened recently in Lynnfield, Massachusettes, when two fathers got into a fight over some rough play on the ice. Their own rough play ended with one dad dead and the other headed to jail for what will likely be a long time. So much for good sportsmanship.

What is it that spurs moms and dads to be so insanely competitive about what is supposed to be fun and games? What makes them shout demeaning phrases from the sidelines? What makes them sign their offspring up for every sport offered? What makes dads hound their sons to play better? What makes moms define themselves by the soccer games they schlep their kids too? We're a nation that's serious about its sports, to be sure, but even professional football players don't try to kill the people they play against. People they live with, maybe, random pedestrians on the street, but nobody in the game. That sort of bleacher rage is apparently reserved for rabid overreaching parents.

And that may be why, though I've come close, I've never signed my daughter up for competitive community sports. I've used her special-ed status as an excuse, but really, I'm scared of those other parents. She seems to have some athletic skill, but not a lot of game-sense to go with it. At soccer camp, she very deliberately, and with concentrated effort, kicked the ball into the wrong goal, with no clue she'd messed up. Since it was an informal game, the parents didn't rip me to shreds, but I'd hate to take that chance at a real game.

I didn't yell at her for mistaking the goal; she was so proud of herself, and I was proud of her for trying. I didn't yell at her when she managed to roll gutter balls even with bumpers in the children's bowling league she played in, either. Her form was bad, her scores were sad, but she was having fun. That wasn't enough for some of the dads who came to watch their sons play, though. They'd stand at the back of the lane berating them for bad balls, shouting at them to watch their wrists or the placement of their feet. I was embarrassed for them; for heaven's sake, it's just bowling. The kids, to their credit, seemed to mostly ignore them. And after a while, they'd go back to the bowling alley bar and have another beer.

There were no dads like that at the games my daughter played with the Challenger League, a softball league for children with special needs. For most of the kids, just getting around the field was an accomplishment, and the crowd responded accordingly. Both teams' worth of parents cheered for both teams, regardless of superficial affiliations. The one time I heard someone making negative comments, they were roundly booed. Each child got to keep swinging at the ball until they made contact, and the inning ended when everyone made it home. At the end of the season, every player got a trophy. Several trophies, actually. My daughter has the beginnings of a proper trophy shelf after that year of play.

But she didn't play anything this season. We felt that she was possibly a little too capable for the everyone-plays, everyone-scores atmosphere of the Challenger League, but not quite capable enough for the play-if-you're-good, score-or-you're-out atmosphere of regular Little League. She's now made it through a week of mainstream basketball camp with a good report, and so in the back of my mind I'm thinking--maybe she can be on our town's girl's basketball team. Maybe she could do that. Maybe she could hold her own. Maybe I could put everything else on hold to drive her to night games that will make her unable to do her homework or get a good night's sleep, and maybe I could do nothing on those nights but sit and watch her warm the bench.

Then again, there's a lot to be said for sitting sports out. Worked for me when I was a kid. Guess I'm just not a team player, or a team parent. It's a whole lot safer that way.

Bad medicine

Low on cash? Trying to build up a college fund? Just want to raise your kids' allowance? Medical science has an offer for you: Let us use your children as guinea pigs in drug studies.

For years, no one has bothered to test children's medications; doctors just made their best guess as to how much of a drug that works on grown-ups would have the desired effect on kids. Which means that one way or another, many of our children have been participating in drug studies all along. But now the FDA is formalizing matters and requiring that before a medication can be given to children, it must receive clinical testing on children.

And that's all well and good, but would you want them tested on your kids? Would you want to knowingly feed your little ones pills that might harm them? It's one thing for adults to consent to be test subjects of their own free will, but how can you do that for your children?

Drug companies, for their part, are offering incentives. Sometimes it's cash. Sometimes it's Geoffrey dollars. Sometimes it's an opportunity to try a wonder drug that might cure the child's very real affliction.

And that last one, I can understand. I can understand parents signing their kids up for drug trials in order to gain access to a particular medication. Most of the pediatric studies listed on the government's ClinicalTrials database are testing medications for cancer and HIV, and those are certainly desperate situations that call for desperate measures. It might be worth the risk of unknown side effects--or worth the risk, given the nature of medical tests, of dosing your child with a placebo that does nothing at all.

But would you take the same risks to, say, test a hayfever medication? Most of these trials involve extensive blood-testing. I can barely get my kids in the doctor's office for shots and finger-sticks that they do need. I can't imagine signing them up for something that involves additional dances with needles. The testing staff would have to beef up for the job of wrestling my kiddos into submission.

Surely we can all agree that this is a necessary thing to do, that adult drugs should not be administered to children if no one knows how safe they are. But as with many necessary things to do, I sure wouldn't want to do it. If you did this sort of thing on your own--giving your kids pills out of your medicine chest just to see what will happen, for example--it would be child abuse. But I guess if the drug companies do it, it's research.

Date night

My husband and I had a rare evening out on Sunday in honor of our tenth anniversary. Well, it was supposed to be an evening out. It turned into an afternoon movie, a break to take our daughter to register at basketball camp, and then dinner for two. Family obligations don't stop just because Mama and Papa want to go on a date.

I know some couples regret or even resent the changes that having children makes in their relationship. We're not one of them. Sure, we have less time for each other, but we never used that time together all that well in the first place. Before we adopted our kids, we would come home from work, eat dinner in front of "Jeopardy," and fall asleep on the couch. Now, we wait until the kids are in bed before we fall asleep on the couch. So actually, maybe we really have more time together.

We've had the kids for half our married life, and we're a pretty good parenting team. My husband shares in all the pick-ups and drop-offs, the homework-enforcing and the bath-supervising. I'm exclusively in charge of dealing with the school district, the doctors, and the therapists; I'm also in charge of the worrying. He makes dinner, does the laundry, washes the dishes, mops the floors. Discipline is mostly the jurisdiction of whoever gets there first, though the runner-up gets to second-guess and criticize. Preferably not in front of the disciplinee, but not always.

So a little kid-care interlude in the middle of our anniversary celebration was just business as usual. It rather fit the theme of the outing, actually. Our movie selection was "Disney's The Kid," a movie we could probably have taken the kids along to (though really, it's more an adult fantasy along the lines of "Groundhog Day" than it is true kiddie fare). And at dinner, although we didn't personally have to deal with children squirming and making noise and making messes, we couldn't help but notice the couple at the next table doing just that. Their baby was being good--only slightly squally--but their toddler was going to town. Rather like my son has done on more raucous restaurant occasions than I can count.

There was a time in our life as a couple when we might have found the tumult from across the aisle annoying--distracting from our conversation and dampening to our dining enjoyment. There was a time when we would have pitied those poor beleaguered parents and been glad we weren't in their shoes. And then there was a time, during our struggles with infertility, when we would have given anything to be in their shoes, screaming or no screaming. But now, we mostly just empathized with the Mom and Dad, having worn their shoes so very many times before. As the little boy shouted "MasterCard! MasterCard! MasterCard!" over and over until his dad let him hold the credit card, and then shouted it again when the waitress took it away, I didn't cringe--I chuckled. I wanted to tell the parents, "Don't worry about keeping him quiet, we have kids too."

And when he wandered toward our table, as he did repeatedly, I wanted to talk to him, give him a piece of the candy I keep in my purse to keep my son quiet in public, show him the toys I keep handy for similar purposes. Instead I just smiled, knowing that, when you're trying to make kids behave like civilized creatures, even the kindness of strangers can be embarrassing. But I wished them well as they scurried out of the place at the earliest possible opportunity. Who knows, maybe one day the parents will come there on their anniversary, and we'll be the noisy family at the next table. My son won't scream out "MasterCard," but he'll surely ask to see their keys.

Don't ask, don't tell

I just left my daughter at basketball camp. It's not a sleepover camp or anything dramatic, no great provoker of separation anxiety, no big growing-up moment. But I still felt like I was abandoning her, sitting there alone, waiting for somebody to tell her what to do. I know she desperately wanted me to wait with her until the actual activities started. I desperately wanted to. But her brother needed to be dropped at his camp, and time was a-wasting, and a mom's gotta do what a mom's gotta do. So I kissed her goodbye, wished her luck, and left her sitting there with that little pursed-mouth look that means she's trying not to cry.

Here's her revenge, though: She's probably having a great time now, and I'm going to be a nervous wreck until we pick her up this afternoon.

This may seem like an extreme level of anxiety for a 10-year-old at day camp. But though I talk a good game about getting my girl out of the overprotective confines of special-education and special-needs settings, I can't help but feel a little protective of her myself. At school, even when she's in a mainstream class, everyone knows that she needs a little extra help. They keep an eye out for her. They even adjust the workload as necessary to make sure she keeps up and stays happy. I fight all the time for her to be challenged as much as possible, and for her limitations not to define her.

But when school's out and we're dealing with after-school and summertime activities, I tend to be the one playing up those limitations. I don't want to go into a strange setting and say: "Hello, this is my daughter, she has severe language delays and language-based learning disabilities, she's two years behind in school and will be more comfortable with eight-year-olds than ten-year-olds, she needs to be told what to do and if she's not sure what to do, she cries." I don't want to introduce her that way. But don't they need to know?

I'd like her to just be able to dive in and figure things out and shine as her own special self without all those labels and special-ed baggage. It's my goal for her to be able to adapt to new situations without lapsing into helplessness. But she's not there yet. If they put her in a group of kids her own age and expect her to function on that level, she's going to be lost. Maybe she can keep up with the eight-year-olds she's with in school. Don't I need to tell them to hold her back? And don't I need to explain why?

In fact, nobody at the basketball camp much wanted to hear about it. I put a note on her application, and mentioned it at sign-in, but it's a busy place with lots of kids running around and no one lingering long over the tender souls. Maybe it's just the nature of sports groups--not a lot of interest in what parents have to say about their kids' abilities. Yeah, yeah, lady, just drop her off and we'll take it from there. She'll prove herself by her ability, or she'll spend the week on the bench. Either way, she'll get through.

Me, on the other hand...

Summertime blues

Is it September yet?

Seriously, I think the summer is going to kill me. We're only a couple of weeks in, and already I'm in a tizzy. The kids are just finishing up on the half-day church camp that turned into a quarter-day for my son, adding to my rush-around-all-morning quotient, and now, on Monday, begins the mad-dash two-kids-at-two-camps-at-one-time derby. The camps are 20 minutes apart. They start and end at the same time, Where do I go to get me one of them time machines?

Then, after a week, my daughter's camp changes, bringing in a whole new set of transport challenges. And after that, she has no camp but her brother does, which makes transportation easier but also means I have a child at home to amuse. Then, when my son's camp ends, I have two. There's a vacation in there somewhere, but all that means to me now is packing and unpacking and occupying jumpy kids on a long airplane flight.

Probably the worst part of all these varied and rush-around summer plans is that we lose our nice predictable routine. The school year has its share of surprises, too, but the kiddos are in the same school, and they're there for a set amount of hours each day, and their after-school activities fall into a predictable pattern, and that's a good thing. For the kids, because routine is so important for children with neurological impairments. And for me, because without a routine to anchor the day's events I forget things.

Last week, for example, I forgot to take my son to his camp orientation. Just plum forgot. It was on the calendar, I had rearranged my work schedule to accommodate it, I was looking forward to meeting his counselors and group-mates, it had been a cherished plan for weeks. And I forgot, because I spent the morning running around helping out at the church camp, brought my son home at the quarter-day mark, went back to church for my daughter's group's program, brought her home and made lunch, handled some work problems long-distance, picked up my niece from day care. . . About the only thing I didn't do was check the darn calendar. And so now I have to wedge a specially arranged camp visitation into this week's impossible schedule.

Two weeks, and I'm ready for a break. I'm ready for a nap. I'm ready to surrender. I'll admit, I can't keep up. Every day, on our dashing around, we pass the school the kids will be going to in the fall. It will take me three minutes to get them there, and then I will have my days back. Nine weeks and counting. I hope I last that long.

How clean is your kitchen?

"Reality" shows that put strangers together in unfamiliar quarters and tape their conflicts and camaraderie continue to be all the rage. We're invited to imagine what it would be like to be stranded on a desert island, or locked inside a strange house with cameras everywhere. How the participants cope with these new situations and new people, how they form friendships and rivalries, how they perform for the camera, how they react to eating rats, are all supposed to make for fascinating, glad-it's-not-me TV. But I've got a real "reality" concept guaranteed to send a shiver down viewers' spines: What if somebody planted a camera in your own comfortable house, recorded all the stupid, embarrassing, unhygienic things you do every day, and then had experts analyze them over the airwaves?

That's the high concept suggested by a recent study in which 100 Utah families had cameras placed in their kitchens so that researchers could observe all their food-handling mistakes. Like most of us, these were folks who would have said they do a fine job of keeping bacteria at bay. But once that candid camera was trained on them, the truth emerged: They were making mistakes with food that made eating live maggots look like a safer option than sitting down to dinner at their house.

Indeed, what desert-island indignity could compare with these horrors: People failing to use soap when washing their hands! Wiping up juice from raw meat with the same towel they use to dry their hands! Failing to wash the lettuce before making a salad! Tasting marinade after raw fish had been soaking in it! Not using soap to wash something that touched raw eggs! "Shocking!" said one expert. "People have no idea!" clucked another.

Well, of course, people probably do have an idea, but they also have a life, and that gets in the way. Researchers acknowledged that squalling kids, calling telemarketers, bawling babies, and all sorts of other true-life drama interfered with the cooks' attention to hygienic detail. And of course, if they had all washed their hands with soap, someone would have had to test the soap bar or bottle for germs, and whoo-ee, maybe they were better off with good strong hot water. I doubt that any of us would really want our cleanliness examined up close and personal. Personally, between the clutter creatures in my living room, the dust dinosaurs under my bed, and the mold monsters in my shower, my home's a horror movie waiting to happen. And talk about germ-filled kitchen rags? Mine is starting to talk back.

No, I can't say I feel any too superior to the mother in the study who fixed her baby's bottle with raw-chicken hands. Which doesn't mean I think she should be protected from public humiliation. The researchers kindly did not show the videotapes of the families' faux pas, hoping to save the already disgraced homemakers further embarrassment. But what fun is that? Surely NBC, a little light on the reality front just now, has a time-slot open? Call it "Kitchen Survivor," and whoever succumbs to food-poisoning last wins a million bucks and a truckload of Lysol products. If NBC passes, Fox is surely up for "World's Most Horrifying Kitchen Slip-Ups!"

Just as long as they don't try to film in my kitchen. I'd rather eat a rat.

He's the tops

Call the Guinness Book of World Records! Notify the medical journals! Wake the newsmagazines! The most hyperactive, most distractible, least focused, most impulsive, least containable, most unmanageable boy on the entire planet Earth has been found in the state of New Jersey. In fact, right here in my home. In the bedroom full of stuff he's picked up from all around the house and put in his room on the pretext of recycling. Yes, there, behind the pile of shopping bags and shoeboxes. It's him! The world record-holder for jumpiness. A child of unprecedented motility. The king of chaos. My sweet son.

It's not like a mother to be modest, but I have to admit, my boy doesn't seem like any sort of record-breaking creature to me. He's a busy boy, to be sure, and I certainly don't deny his many challenges, but--the most uncontrollable boy in the world? How can that be? At home, he's generally manageable, unless of course we ask him to do something like homework or eating neatly, and then all bets are off. Given the nature of his neurological problems, firm resistance to things that are difficult is to be expected. A wide range of annoying behaviors is to be expected, as a matter of fact. And yet I'm constantly told that his particular behaviors are unexpectedly disruptive, even in contexts where I would expect them to be the norm.

He's been rejected from two different groups designed to teach social skills to autistic children because the therapist thought he would distract the other kids. A therapist who just evaluated him for a therapeutic horseback riding program specifically designed for autistic, Down syndrome, and ADHD kids told me flat-out that I couldn't expect him to have as long a session as the others because he was so all-over-the-place. A child psychologist who specializes in behavior problems asked me within ten minutes of meeting my son whether he was always so annoyingly active. These are people who work with active, distractible, unfocused, impulsive, uncontainable, unmanageable kids every day, yet my son stands out as someone they don't want to deal with. So he must be exponentially more of all those things than even his most impaired comrade in brain damage.

I'd like to think that the problem lies not in my son, but in the so-called professionals. Obviously they are not skilled enough, or they would be able to engage him. Obviously they are lazy, or they would want to take on his challenge. Obviously they are inexperienced, or they would know that kids like him are like this. Obviously they are so used to seeing children who are medicated that they're too spoiled to deal with the real thing. How can you, say, bring an inquisitive and curious boy into a stable, with horses and dogs and strange smells and sights galore, and be peeved when he doesn't focus on you, a boring old human who is after all a stranger? How can you interview a child in a room full of knickknacks, as one therapist did, and be put off when he checks each one out? Are "typical" kids so different? Is this boy really so odd?

Yet I've heard the same verdict so many times that there must be something to it. He must just be Active Boy 2.0, the new improved version, faster and more frustrating. And isn't that what people want these days--to be the most, to be extreme? Perhaps I should embrace his uncontrollable nature and start exploiting it. Tell the talk shows we're ready! But make sure they bring in a few more cameras to catch all that extra action. My boy knows no boundaries.

Snack attack

Wake up, they're fat! That's the message about our kids that's blaring from the cover of this week's Newsweek, and I'm starting to get an idea as to why that may be. On snack-room duty at my kids' half-day church camp this week, I'm seeing what people are sending in for their first- to fifth-graders to munch on. And I'm wondering if possibly they think the camp is on a desert island and they have to save their little ones from eating rats.

I'm shocked by the amount of food these kiddos are bringing in. To me, snack means "small amount of food to sustain child through a morning's learning." To some folks, it apparently means "lunch." I see sandwiches and chips, I see elaborate Lunchable ensembles, I see thermoses and jumbo-sized lunchboxes packed full. Cartons of yogurt. Tubs of fruit salad. One girl had a pre-fab kit of silver-dollar pancakes, syrup, and a leather-like item that was undoubtedly supposed to represent sausage. Did she skip breakfast? Will she eat lunch?

What makes all this worse is that the kids have a very brief amount of time to chow this stuff down. "Recess" is fifteen minutes, and that includes snack time. So they have about ten minutes to eat and five minutes to run around the parking lot "playing." Someone needs to send a memo home to moms and dads letting them know that this is not a 45-minute lunch break, like in school, and they should pack snack bags accordingly. The memo should also mention that this break comes about one hour into a four-hour day, so far from being starved from all their hard work, the campers are probably still digesting their Lucky Charms.

Poor scheduling, to be sure. Speaking for my own personal kids, they have a hard time putting away even a tiny snack in ten minutes, my son because he so enjoys playing with his food, my daughter because she eats at a pace that makes glaciers look breakneck. And even I would have difficulty gobbling down some of their campmates' brown-bag extravaganzas in the alotted time. I don't think I could even drink some of the enormous containers of juice before the bell.

Since this is after all a church function, perhaps we should be collecting all the uneaten snack items and sending them to a soup kitchen. We'd be offering the homeless the very latest in snack-food technology, that's for sure. The little packages of cookies that you dip in frosting seem to be popular; now there's a healthy snack. Crackers with a raspberry-jam dip might be a bit more nutritionally sound, but just a bit. Fruit roll-ups now come in flavors and colors I never knew existed; one girl had a rainbow number that looked awfully purty. She finished it and then took a large roll of fruit "tape" out of her bag and proceeded to peel and eat that. A balanced snack--two forms of flat fruit! One boy had one of those mini-pizza kits where you squirt tomato sauce, sprinkle cheese, and pop pepperoni on top of a crust the size of a jar lid. I think he about got one assembled before the bell rang.

On the beverage front, it appears that foil juice-bags have bested juice boxes as the container of choice. This I will never understand: You hand your child a bag full of juice and you expect him not to squirt his neighbors with it? I haven't caught any bad behavior, but there do seem to be puddles left behind when the snackers are gone. I have enough trouble avoiding squirting when holding a full juice-box firmly. There are no juice bags in my family's future. But other parents have no such qualms; one mom sent her boy in with three juice bags. One to drink, two for food fights?

Parenting by the book

Do modern parents overanalyze the parenting process? Do they make a simple job complicated? Do they spend too much time reading parenting books and not enough time actually parenting? So says a...well, a parenting book that caught my eye today on the Barnes & Noble shelf: Parents Who Think Too Much: Why We Do It, How to Stop It. According to the publisher, author Anne Cassidy "talks about why all that thinking hasn't worked. She tells you why it is time to drop out of parenting class ... adjust your priorities so life does not revolve around a 6-year-old's soccer schedule ... and trust your instincts. With much humor, some outrage, and great wisdom, she discusses: what's wrong with a kid-centered society; why we are making the world too safe for our kids; why 'feel-good' discipline is a bad idea; why raising a happy, average kid is a terrific goal; how to find your own parental voice and style ... and more. The only thing she won't do? She won't tell you how to raise your child." And presumably, she won't tell you to stop buying parenting books until after you've picked up hers.

Frankly, I have trouble believing that a parent who doesn't think is a better parent. I have trouble believing that parenting books are the root of all evil. And I mostly have trouble believing a parenting book that tells me that. I mean, really, Anne, a sign in every Borders and Barnes & Noble in the land saying, "Hey, you! Stop reading this crap!" would have done just as well. Did you really need add another tome to the bundles o' books crowding the shelves? Books about protecting kids, protecting boys, protecting girls; disciplining kids, educating kids, entertaining kids; giving kids a moral sense, financial sense, a sense of humor; adopting kids, birthing kids, toilet-training kids, getting kids to sleep; being more stern, being more free, holding on tighter, letting go; being a mom, being a dad, being a single parent, being a grandparent, being a stepparent; dealing with hyper children, sensitive children, out-of-sync children, explosive children, challenging children, gifted children, spirited children, children with every special need imaginable but mostly ADHD children. Are parents obsessing because there are so many books, or are there so many books to feed the obsession?

And does it really matter? For each trend in parenting, there will be an equal and opposite trend. You see it on parenting e-mail lists--somebody asks a question, somebody else gives an answer, and then yet another somebody completely contradicts it, often implying that the original answer was ignorant, harmful, or indicative of a wholly inadequate parenting mindset. Why should we expect authors to be any different? Glancing at bookstore shelves or Amazon Web pages lately, you can see that for each book touting a foolproof set of parenting rules, you'll find a book that advises you not to listen to those rules, listen to these rules, and a book that says you shouldn't be following any rules, and a book that says that not following rules is what caused the problem in the first place. No wonder "parents today," as the books like to call us, are so completely confused. Every child and every family is different, and nobody has all the answers, but that sure doesn't shut anybody up. Parenting may be one of the few areas in which even people who have never done it and never will consider themselves experts.

And what the experts seem to be saying these days is that we're idiots for listening to experts. In addition to Parents Who Think Too Much, there's the enjoyably titled I'm Okay, You're a Brat!: Setting the Priorities Straight and Freeing You from the Guilt and Mad Myths of Parenthood. Says the Amazon blurb, "In this refreshingly honest book, bestelling author Dr. Susan Jeffers breaks the 'conspiracy of silence' and pulls no punches when detailing just how difficult parenthood can be. With humor and compassion, she reveals the insidious guilt that some child-care experts cause parents to feel. She questions many myths and half-truths that make parents feel inadequate and offers valuable 'survival' tools to cope with it all." Notice only some child-care experts are indicted here; present company excepted, no doubt.

But lest we be empowered to shed guilt and admit that sometimes kids are brats no matter how hard their parents work, here comes America's favorite feel-good shrink, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, with a bucket of cold water. In Parenthood by Proxy: Don't Have Them If You Won't Raise Them, the good doctor "entreats parents to involve themselves in their children's hearts, minds, and souls, to cherish and protect them, and to commit to the essential task of teaching them right from wrong. She acknowledges that parents no longer get much support from neighbors or public and private institutions, but she urges mothers and fathers to work even harder to counteract the prevailing culture of selfishness and irresponsibility."

So...what? Are we trying to hard or do we need to try harder? Are we overthinking or behaving thoughtlessly? Are our kids brats because of us or in spite of us? And while these folks are out writing, promoting, and speaking about their books, who the heck is watching their kids? Perhaps one of us hapless parents should write about Parents Who Spout Off Too Much, and advise would-be know-it-alls to just run their fancy-pants theories by their mothers and mothers-in-law before commiting them to print. The bookshelves would quickly be barren.

And I'd have to find something else to read.

Give me a break

Mamas, watch what your daughters drink. If they're sippin' the wrong beverages, they could be apt to cause themselves bodily harm. In fact, there's one devilish concoction popular with our young people today that quintuples the likelihood of breaking a bone. To drink it indicates such a lack of regard for one's personal health and safety that parents would do right to be concerned.

It's likely, though, that Mom and Dad are drinking the stuff themselves. And it's not alcohol that puts young bones in such danger. No high-octane cocktail or drug-spiked brew. This viper in our midst is found in refrigerators across the land, in vending machines and mini-marts and fast-food palaces and picnic coolers.

That's right, the culprit is cola.

According to a study by the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, girls who drink the demon cola are practically begging for a bone fracture. Researchers surveyed active freshman and sophomore girls at a Boston high school and found that, while only five of 57 girls who just said no to Coke and Pepsi suffered fractures, a whopping 38 out of 107 cola-chuggers experienced that injury. Simply sipping soda of any sort made a break three times more likely, but the nectar of the cola nut raised that to five. And yet this hazardous substance is sold in high school cafeterias throughout the land! Alert the media! Let loose the politicians!

What is it about cola that makes bones so brittle? The problem may not be what's in the can, but what's not: calcium. The theory runs that girls who are drinking soda aren't drinking milk, and milk, as we all know, builds strong bodies 12 ways. No, wait, that's Wonder Bread. Milk makes strong bones, anyway, but you're not likely to find a high school girl who'll be caught dead drinking it. Cow juice is kid stuff, and if they weren't drinking cola they'd probably be drinking coffee, or sports drinks, or designer water, or beer.

There's also speculation that the phosphorus found in cola actually weakens bones, but let's not let that get out, because while no amount of ads of milk-mustached celebrities is likely to make moo juice cool, imbibing harmful chemicals most certainly is cool, and kids will start quaffing more cola just for the kick of turning their bones to Jello. Besides, the lack of calcium caused by deficient milk-drinking seems to be the strongest factor in weakening bones. "Osteoporosis is a pediatric disease," says Dr. Neville H. Golden, director of the Eating Disorders Center in the Division of Adolescent Medicine at Schneider Children's Hospital in New Hyde Park, N.Y. Which means that those healthy young active girls will soon be racing us old, stooped women for those bottles of calcium supplements. Unless we stack a few cans of soda nearby as a decoy.

Not surprisingly, the cola industry is taking a defensive stance on all of this. A spokesman for the National Soft Drink Association was quoted as saying, and I'll paraphrase here, "Aw, go squeeze a cow." But I think they're missing the boat. Why not just fortify all those yummy carbonated colas with calcium? It's a whole new market niche. It shouldn't be hard--calcium is turning up in all sorts of products these days where it has no business being. Why not pop? Just think of the ad campaign possibilities--beautiful young celebrities lounging about with their cans of soda, talking about how calcium-spiked cola is responsible for their rock-solid bone structure.

Logic problem

I hate standardized tests. I think they're a poor way to measure schools' effectiveness and harmful to the educational process. I think they try to quantify something that is not truly measurable in such rigid terms. I think they put pressure on teachers to teach to the test instead of teaching what students need to succeed. I think they take creativity out of the classroom and put conformity in.

Unless my child scores well, in which case they're a wonderful measuring device for proving that she's learning, she's really learning.

I especially hate standardized tests for special-needs kids, who must necessarily learn in different ways. I think they're skewed against kids for whom English is not the first language. I think they're skewed against kids who spent formative years in another culture, or in a deprived or neglectful setting. I think they make teachers fearful of inclusion, lest the teacher's effectiveness be measured by the progress of kids for whom learning is hard. I think they're a poor indicator of a child's actual ability to cope in real-life situations.

Unless my child scores well, in which case they're a true and accurate portrait of her abilities, and should be accepted by everybody as proof that she can be successful.

This year, my child scored well. Her numbers were above average in language, math, science, social studies, and total score, and I take those as proof that I was right in wresting her from self-contained special-ed and putting her in a regular-ed class with an instructional aide. Ha, that's right, I was right, right, right! Look how much she's learned in this new setting! Her scores were triple or more what they were on the same level test last year. Take that, you naysaying Child Study Team members!

Of course, her score for reading stank, actually lower than the very-low level it was at last year, but that's clearly a statistical glitch. Probably a misprint or something on the test form. Reading comprehension questions are often confusingly worded, and frequently fall into areas of knowledge that my girl doesn't possess because she spent her first 4.5 years in a Russian orphanage. Don't confuse me with low scores. Low scores are inaccurate. High scores are true and meaningful. It's parent's logic. Don't confuse me with the facts.

Facts are things that parents of special-needs kids moving through the special-ed system are bombarded with all the time. Facts and test scores, evaluations and estimations, all those formulas and numbers that attempt to sum up our children's potential. We sit in rooms full of professionals and hear that our seven-year-old is functioning as a five-year-old in this and a four-year-old in that and a three-year-old in the other. We hear that our ten-year-old is in many ways like a seven-year-old, and not the sharpest seven-year-old, either. It's horrifying to hear your child's abilities summed up in months and years, such low months and years. And so you've got to grab for the good news when it comes along, however dubious it may be.

When my son was evaluated last year upon leaving the school's pre-K program, he miraculously scored as close to his actual age level in cognitive skills. Close to his actual age level! He'd never been close to his actual age level in anything before. Height, weight, head size, motor skills, language skills--all significantly lagging, years and years behind. But damn, he thinks like a seven-year-old! High fives all around! Now, if he'd scored low, I'd have had a million excuses--doesn't test well, tester couldn't engage him, yada yada yada. But my boy scored high! He showed what he can do! That's the sort of thing to which we parents cling.

That, and positive standardized test scores. There's a million excuses for why my daughter did well and a million reasons why her doing well means nothing--after all, she's a ten-year-old scoring above average for an eight-year-old; among kids her own age, she'd be a cellar dweller for sure. She's also on her second time through second grade, so she darn well should be showing some improvement. Do her higher scores mean that a) we've finally found the right level for her, and as she follows along in her two-years-behind course she will continue to perform well; b) regular-ed teachers do a better job of prepping kids for stupid standardized tests than do special-ed teachers; c) my daughter needs two years in every grade to actually learn something; or d) coloring the bubbles in the shape of a smiley face turned out to yield the right answers this time around?

I'm choosing answer A. And if you say I'm wrong, well, tests like this are for the birds.

Dealing drugs

I've only just gotten used to seeing prescription-drug ads in magazines, like the one with a little cloud on one page and a little sun on the other page and a little plug for Prozac. It seems odd to see Prozac hawked along with the booze and cigarettes and CDs and cars. It's odder still to see non-over-the-counter meds advertised on TV--people going on about their allergens and allergy medication, people dancing and singing the praises of their heartburn medication, people swearing by the latest weight-loss drug. I must not have gotten the memo about this sort of thing being legal all of a sudden, but clearly the floodgates have been opened. Drug companies are marketing directly to consumers, and though they haven't started giving us free pens and pads and all-expenses-paid conventions the way they do with doctors, that time may well be coming.

In the meantime, we get Web sites. That's right, those same pill peddlers who've been telling you in print and on the tube why you should nag your doctor to prescribe you their product are now setting up cozy little internet offices. Feeling sniffly? Surf over to www.claritin.com, where you can sign up for a daily e-mail pollen alert, get a personalized allergy profile, subscribe to the monthly "Blue Skies Newsletter" full of seasonal allergy tips, even customize Claritin's home page so it suits your own specific allergy needs. And--surprise!--get a $5 rebate on your next prescription.

Similarly on call to meet all your personalized health needs is www.acidcontrol.com, the online site for heartburn helper Prilosec. Here you'll find, among other helpful things, a quiz, a glossary, a list of food triggers, and an offer for a free information kit containing a brochure, a questionnaire, and a personal heartburn diary (but hey, what about a Prilosec pen?) If you just can't wait to start documenting your acid reflux, though, the site offers an online diary in which you can record those painful moments, take note of what may have caused them, and then print out a detailed report for your doctor so that he can treat you properly and, oh, I don't know, maybe give you some Prilosec?

The site for the anti-depressant Paxil, currently advertising heavily on TV as a cure for "social anxiety disorder," is set up as a Mental Health Weather Station, with panic disorder pictured as a violent lightning storm, depression as a driving rainstorm, obsessive-compulsive disorder as a threatening cyclone, and social anxiety disorder as...well, the picture for social anxiety disorder shows a guy banging his head against the wall, maybe because he forgot his umbrella and is afraid to ask anyone for a loaner. In addition to clinical info on each of these afflictions, personal accounts are offered: Supermodel Beverly Johnson talks about her panic disorder! Professional baseball pitcher Pete Harnisch takes about depression! Some guy you've never heard of talks about OCD! But the centerpiece of the site is the Social Phobia Inventory Test, which invites you to select your relative degree of agreement with various statements ("Parties and social events scare me" "I am bothered by blushing in front of people") and then offers an assessment of how likely you are to have social anxiety disorder. I scored 12 out of a possible 68, which even the Paxil people had to admit did not sound like much of a problem. But the mere fact that I had taken the test at all seemed suspicious to them, and they urged that if I even thought I might have a problem, I ought to go see my doctor at once. And, um, is there any particular medication I should ask about?

Prozac, no less concerned about our well-being, offers an array of "Recovery Tools" to make sure your treatment is working the way it should (and if you're not taking Prozac, undoubtedly it ain't.) At www.prozac.com, you can follow your progress with the Zung Depression Tracking Tool, plot your recovery on the Kupfer Curve, sign up for daily e-mails that remind you to take your medication, or forward the page to a friend so that they can be depressed, too. Of course there's a diagnostic quiz, this one called the Zung Depression Self-Assessment Test. Now, this isn't to be used if you're really, really, really depressed--the opening disclaimer clearly states that if you are feeling suicidal at this very moment, you really ought to skip the quiz and go straight to the ER. Those who are still somewhat short of the ledge can go ahead and agree or disagree with statements like "I enjoy looking at, talking to, and being with attractive men/women" or "I feel that others would be better off if I were dead." I can't tell you what my score was on this one, because although I answered every question, the computer kept telling me I didn't. A plot to send depressed people screaming for Prozac? You be the judge.

Wondering what fun your own medication of choice has to offer? In most cases, you can just plug it right into an url and see what comes up. www.provera.com, the site for the contraceptive Depo Provera, offers a detailed description of what to expect from a pelvic exam and instructions on how to do Kegel exercises. www.tamiflu.com helps you assess whether or not you've got influenza; please try not to vomit on the keyboard as you review the symptoms. I tried www.ritalin.com, but was bounced to a search engine that warned me many of my results were adults-only. Even worse, when I entered the name of my decongestant, Duratuss, I wound up at a porn site which professed to specialize in bikini-clad babes. Maybe that stuff would clear somebody's sinuses, but not mine. And speaking of porn sites, one of the offerings on www.viagra.com is "Success Stories." Do any of them involve bikini'd babes, I wonder? At any rate, I'm not going near that self-test.

It's a hoax, folks

When most people talk about Internet junk mail, they're talking about spam--unsolicited solicitations from businesses, lone entrepreneurs, or porn peddlers that pop up unbidden in your inbox. There are ways to control your spam intake--employing filters, for example, or dumping AOL. But there's not much to be done about that other form of Web refuse, the Internet Hoax, because it's usually sent to you by somebody you know, for your own good. Seems some story or other turns up on one of my e-mail lists on a daily basis, always submitted by a goodhearted member, always about some horrific hot-button issue, always suggesting the recipient e-mail it like crazy. They may not officially be viruses--in fact, more often than not they're about viruses--but they sure replicate like one.

Mostly, I disregard and delete. Sometimes, if the subject is particularly inflammatory and I've got some time on my hands, I'll hop on over to the Urban Legends Reference Page and check it out. This site is a treasurechest of bunk, and you're likely to see things you never thought to question disproved in forthright fashion. HIV-filled hypodermic needles lurking in theater seats, pay-phone coin slots, and gas pumps? False. Virus-soaked sponges being sent through the mail? False. Cockroach eggs in envelope glue? False, though CBS is probably thinking of planting some on envelopes given to letter-writing contestants on "Survivor." Bill Gates giving people $1,000 for forwarding an e-mail? Alas, false. Asbestos in crayons? Well, that one's true, but only in miniscule amounts, and manufacturers are currently changing the formula.

Then there's the one about atheist poster-girl Madalyn Murray O'Hair trying to get "Touched by an Angel" taken off the air. That one turned up in my household today in rare hard-copy form: a handout my mother-in-law brought back from her church meeting. "Stand up and be counted!!!" it read. "CBS will be forced to discontinue 'Touched by an Angel' for using the word 'God' in every program." (Well, hey, I'll bet "NYPD Blue" uses the word God in every program, too, though admittedly not in a religious context.) It goes on to inform us about petition No. 2493, currently before the Federal Communication Commission, that seeks to ban all religious programming on TV. No more Christmas specials! No more televised church services! No more televangelists! Wait, why are we supposed to be upset about this? Oh, yes, because that O'Hair woman, having single-handedly banned prayer from schools, is now trying to ban it from the airwaves and Must Be Stopped! We're asked to fill out a form indicating our desire, as God-fearing people, to keep TV safe for has-been pop stars with yuletide albums.

Now, if you ask me, anyone who's trying to get "Touched by an Angel" off the air is doing us a tremendous favor. That show offends my deeply held faith that angels wouldn't be caught immortal in hair like Della Reese's. In fact, all these angel shows, on the air and on the movie screen, are mixed blessings indeed. I caught part of "City of Angels" on a movie channel the other day, and an angelic being was willing to fall to earth just to have sex with Meg Ryan, who was promptly hit by a truck. (Those of you who would like to see Meg Ryan hit by a truck in all her movies...well, that's a different petition.) Surely we Christians would like to believe that God's messengers have better judgment than that. Entertainment that glues on religious themes just to seem deep winds up trivializing religion more than Madalyn Murray O'Hair could ever have hoped to. I imagine her someplace watching this stuff and having a good old laugh.

That someplace would be well hidden, because the woman disappeared in 1995 with her son, granddaughter, and a heck of a lot of her organization's money. She's not been seen since, which will make it difficult for her to argue her alleged case before the FCC. But as the Urban Legend folks explain, petition No. 2493 has already been before the FCC, and rejected by that body--in 1975. It had nothing to do with O'Hair, or with banning the mention of God on TV. It merely asked that religious groups affiliated with universities not be granted licenses to broadcast as educators when in fact they mean to broadcast as religious groups. The FCC said, and I'll paraphrase here, "We wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot pole." For their defense of religious tolerance, the FCC has been rewarded with about 30 million missives in the last 25 years asking them to just say no to something they were never asked. They wish you'd cut it out, by the way.

Sadly, it seems that people will believe and act on anything. Even more sadly, it seems that nobody is trying to get "Touched by an Angel" off the air after all. Can we appeal to the FCC on the basis of taste? It's time to stand up and be counted!

Why Mommy can't play

Good news for lazy parents: Turns out playing with your children, directing their activities, encouraging them, and helping them decide what to do is actually a bad thing. That's right, it's better to leave the kids alone with those asbestos-laced crayons and let them do what they will than to suggest a direction or a color or even so basic an endeavor as staying between the lines.

Aiding kids in that way stunts their creativity--or so suggests a new study by the American Psychological Society. Children whose parents were actively involved in their play felt pressured to perform and judged on that performance. Whereas children whose parents could care less what they were up to presumably felt free to be wildly creative and original and true to their unique little selves. One can hope that their muse did not lead them to actually color on the walls, but one would hardly want to tell them not to.

Still, I applaud this new information, since it supports my selfish theory that children should know how to play and just leave me alone and go do it already. At last, now, I know I'm right to sit like a lump in front of the computer screen, reading my usual 487 pieces of e-mail, while my young ones learn spontaneity and initiative and how to amuse their own little selves. Lately, my son's imagination has led him to play Recycling Man; this involves going around the house and filling plastic shopping bags with various items that I will one day miss. He has a toy shopping cart in which he puts these bags and transports them about the house. I could tell him that what he's really playing is Homeless Man, but that would be applying my own rules to his creativity, and fie on that.

My daughter, on the other hand, has always had a tough time coming up with a play plan and has relied on me to tell her how to occupy herself, but no more. If I keep giving her ideas, how will she ever become a creative, free-thinking adult? And if what she freely thinks is that she'd like to watch Nickelodeon until her eyes fall out, well, who am I to hamper that self-determination? Keeps her out of my hair.

Yes, it's a happy day. No more showing the kiddos how to put together Legos into the impossibly complex forms detailed in the instructions, or putting play-doh through the intricate permutations suggested in the kits it comes with. If they can't figure it out themselves, let them figure out something different. And if it involves major clean-up--and tell me, what unsupervised children's activity does not?--well, perhaps its time to let the young people channel their own inner Hazel and learn to clean in a spontaneous and imaginative fashion that does not involve mom. If they don't judge me by my previous performance in this field, I won't judge them on theirs.

It's the thought that counts

The end of school is two weeks away, which is a good thing because it means the kids have successfully navigated another year through the educational system, and a bad thing because I am responsible for successfully navigating them through another understructured summer. But the hardest thing about the end of school isn't figuring out how to handle all those end-of-year half-days, or figuring out where to send them for camp, or figuring out how to keep their brains running for three months so they won't be stalled in September--it's figuring out what to give the teachers for year-end thank-you gifts.

Gifts are a good thing because they give you a chance to show your appreciation to the people who have taken the little ones off your hands for nine grueling months and actually taught them something in the process, and a bad thing because you know whatever you buy will wind up on the big heap of useless junk the teachers get from similarly thoughtful but clueless parents. I look at the racks and racks of little apples and little schoolhouses on the Hallmark shelves and wonder how many of each the teacher will be getting. I try not to obsess about this; I want to get something nice, but I don't want the choice to take over my life. In the end, it's the thought that counts, though I don't suppose that's much comfort when she opens her fifth or sixth desktop bell or wooden apple calendar.

I'll admit, I'm also pretty cheap when it comes to teacher gifts, which does not reflect on my esteem for those individuals, but mostly reflects on the sheer number of individuals involved in any one year of special education. At times, when both kids were in special ed, we might have had two teachers, four aides, two bus drivers, two bus aides, two speech therapists, one physical therapist, and two occupational therapists. Even getting all those folks an inexpensive gift adds up fast. I'd think about ranking the personnel in terms of time and effort spent with each child and then giving each a class of gift that corresponds with their relative investment, but pretty soon I'd need to quit my job in order to work through all the various permutations. And then I'd have even less money for gifts.

I remember the first Christmas I had a child in school, I brought the teacher and aides and therapists pumpkin bread for a gift. I thought that was a nice thing, from the heart; not a big deal, just a thoughtful gesture. Then I happened to get a look in their back room, and saw piles of huge gifts. I've never felt comfortable just gesturing since. Though in fact, they may have enjoyed the pumpkin bread more than the contents of those boxes. One teacher friend tells of receiving one year, from a young pupil, the gift of a bra. And not just any bra, but one that was well-worn and sweat-stained. His mom is probably still searching the washing machine for it, wondering where it went.

I figure I can do better than that. And if not, I won't be alone out there on the big heap of useless junk.

Trials and tribulations

My husband has jury duty week after next. This would not be a problem--doing his civic duty and all--except that 1) he had already taken that week off for vacation and 2) the reason he had taken it off for vacation is because it's the last week of school and the kids have four half-days in a row. Two days of that week I go into work, and he was going to be available for 1 p.m. pick-up. But now the court's got dibs. This problem became clear after it was too late for him to plead child-care needs and try to ditch his duty, so we just have to wait and hope they decide at the last minute that he's not needed.

I've actually never minded jury duty much myself; it's like a paid vacation from reality. I rarely get on a case, so it's a nice time to catch up on some reading in the waiting room, if I can ignore the Jerry Springer episodes somebody always turns the TV to. The one time I was actually chosen for a jury, we wound up hung. It seemed like an open-and-shut case, but the prosecuting attorney was so inarticulate and inept and the defense attorney was like something straight out of "L.A. Law," and the latter ran rings around the evidence so successfully that he formed reasonable doubt in the mind of one very stubborn juror. The protestations of her 11 colleagues meant nothing, and so we made no decision. Not exactly a satisfying way to spend a week.

The most satisfying jury-duty experience I've ever had was my spell on a Grand Jury--one day a week for ten weeks. We heard multiple cases each day, and the great part was that we weren't deciding anyone's guilt or innocence, just determing whether there was enough evidence to go to trial. A majority could do that; didn't need that pesky unanimity. The legal eagles in charge of the proceedings were highly articulate and often funny. Some of the cases were unpleasant, which made me glad that I didn't have to live with them for weeks. Clearly, if one has to be on a jury at all, this is the way to go.

But not the way my husband has to go; he's scheduled for a solid week, and the kids aren't quite. Whose idea is this half-day school stuff anyway? Why have a last week of school if it only works out to half a week? And speaking of working, don't they realize that a lot of parents do? Are they just trying to phase the kids out? My two are going straight from that week into two weeks of half-day camp, so we have a lot of empty afternoons in our future. Let's hope there are no protracted jury trials in Papa's.

New kids on campus

An interesting thing about having children in special education is that you never can tell what school they're going to be in. Instead of their home school, the kids are bounced to whatever campus happens to be hosting their particular program that year. Ironic, of course, that the children who most need stability, structure, and predictability in their school environment are the least likely to get it. In our district, anyway, it's often not decided until a few weeks before classes start where a child will end up, much less with whom.

My kids have never gone to our neighborhood school, though my daughter has been lucky enough to stay in the same cross-town school for five years. My son has been in two different schools, but for the last three years has been in the same school as his sister. That school has come to feel like home to us--the kids know their way around the building, I know my way around the system. I've let myself get more and more involved in the Home and School Association in the hope that this would be the place where my two would continue through their elementary years.

But now, there's talk of moving them both. And, surprisingly enough, it's to our own neighborhood school. No more explaining to people why they go to the school they do. No more driving cross-town for playdates. The sheer normalcy of it is exciting. We drive by the building every day now, thinking about it. It's a nice-looking, all-American kind of school, two stories, vaguely colonial architecture, welcoming sign out front. Different from the school they've been going to. On a main street instead of a side street. Next to a restaurant instead of an apartment building. Across from a church instead of electrical towers. Bigger, but more contained. Will my kids like it? Will the kids there like them? The first day of school is a summer away, but we're already feeling the anticipation and anxiety.

Them, and me too. I wouldn't say I've made a lot of friends at that other school in that other neighborhood, but at least the people are familiar to me and with me. I'm comfortable there. The school my son went to before joining his sister was a school I emphatically didn't feel comfortable at. It was in one of the ritziest neighborhoods in town, and the moms were all well-toned and Spandex clad with big hair and good tans, and I'm this little schlumpy thing with two special-ed kids and no darn time to sell tickets to the fashion-show fund-raiser. I couldn't get my guy out of that school fast enough.

What if the moms at the new school aren't nice? What if the Home and School is cliquish, and has all sorts of rules I won't know? The moms there will be my neighbors, so I truly do have to live with them. And what about the principal? I pretty much had the old one figured out, and now I'll have to get to be known all over again. Hard as it is on the kids to be bopped around from school to school, it may be harder on moms like me, who try to get involved and get to know the staff and be part of the school scene. I've been promised that if we make this move, the kids won't have to move again until junior high. Don't think I could take any more than that.

Is Celine Dion a houseplant?

Call me sensitive, but the headline caught my eye. There, on the list of stories on my personalized Yahoo! page. "Celine Dion Fertilized."

What is she, a farm?

Bad enough to have your difficulty conceiving made fodder for tabloids. Bad enough to have your every infertility-clinic visit documented. But to have your efforts to have a child described in terms that make people think of cow manure--is this really necessary? Are there no limits to the news media's insensitivity?

Wait, don't answer that.

Now mind you, I'm no great fan of Celine Dion. I'd almost rather have my 10-year-old listen to hardcore rap than play "My Heart Will Go On" one more time. I find her vocal stylings to be so over the top as to make my fillings ache.

And to be even more honest, I'm no great fan of infertility treatments. We stopped fairly early in the process and went for adoption, with no regrets. I suppose I respect every woman's right to do painful and bothersome things to her body in the pursuit of parenthood, but I'd say that when news organizations refer to you as though you were the Back 40, or perhaps a limp houseplant, it might be time to call Tom and Nicole's adoption attorney and get yourself a baby who's already been fertilized, so to speak. Or better still, an older child with special needs who could benefit from the kind of help that Titanic-size record sales could provide.

But that's just me. If Celine and her husband want to harvest a crop they planted themselves, far be it from me to judge. In fact, I wish them all the best in their efforts. I wish them more thoughtful headlines. I wish them many, many babies. And most of all, I wish that Celine's sabbatical would go on and on and on. Gotta save that voice for yelling at the kids.