Never in a million years did I think I ever would write this imperative sentence:  Bring back sentence diagramming. 

Yes, I am an old fogey, apparently. And yes, I went to Catholic school, where the nuns and lay teachers drilled sentence diagramming into our heads so much that I dreamed about which lines adjectives belonged on and how to connect the compound-complex sentence with a coordinating conjunction. 

I never thought I could love a toilet so much. 

Ahhhh….the Gerber Ultra Flush. 

So.  Welcome to the Bad Mommy Chronicles, Vol. 1, No. 150. Topic: What to do when your kid’s suspended from school. 

Last week was a stellar one in the Beem house. We had an ice dam on the roof, an absentee husband jetting around North America on business, two upstairs toilets that managed to overflow at exactly the same moment and 10 minutes before the youngest had to be at school, and the much-coveted call from an assistant principal informing the parent that her oldest would be chilling at home for the next three school days – not counting the federal holiday in the middle of it. 

I’m not really into technology. In fact, I think it makes life harder sometimes. 

Sure, I’m sitting here using a laptop, typing something I’m going to post on a web site, which I’ll also post on Facebook and Tweet about and just wander all over cyberspace with trying to dig up readers.  

I got an automated personal call from my school district’s superintendent Tuesday night. 

No school Wednesday, he said. 

My oldest child hovers on the cusp of adulthood, but he’s still a little boy inside. 

When he thinks no one’s looking, he’ll still put on his Patriots helmet and stages a make-believe football game in the family room. Sometimes he forgets he’s still wearing the helmet and comes into the kitchen for a drink, where he encounters me or his dad. But we look away and pretend we didn’t see him channeling Tom Brady. 

You ever wonder how crazy family stories get started?  You know, the kind that gets passed down from generation to generation.  

Like the lore where your great-grandpa slept upright in a chair on the back porch of the farm house, a shotgun in his lap, waiting to get the fox who’d been preying on the chickens? And then, in the early hours of the morning, he saw the fox and fired several shots, missing the wily creature but blowing a big hole in the chicken house and taking out a few nesting hens at the same time?  

OK, class, today we’re going to talk about something that causes angst for many, including my family: birthdays that conflict with holidays. 

In fact, my bringing this up could cause a major “discussion” over these very holidays whereof I speak if my parents read this blog, but I’m willing to take one for the team on this.

I remember the moment so clearly. 

It was late October, and I was sitting at the kitchen table, working on my laptop. Two or three kids were watching some mindless Nickelodeon show while they munched their after-school snack. A commercial came on that reminded them of Christmas.

So yesterday I turned 41. They say you lose your inhibitions as you age, which must explain Saturday. 

Here’s what happened: 

This last weekend provided yet another stellar example of my parenting skills. 

Our oldest is 13, and this school year has been a challenge. Between his sometimes-surly attitude and sudden dearth of communication regarding his classes at school, my husband and I feel like we’re raising a brick wall. 

This is a crazy week for me, so I'm posting something previously published. This ran in 2003 in the FYI section of The Kansas City Star.

                                                                  ****

So a few weeks back, the Today show had a story on how to tell whether you’re a Wife-in-Chief. 

I was thinking it was a story about Michelle Obama, so I paused in my morning frenzy to have a listen. 

I gotta say, the whole Larry Johnson thing just really helps me as a parent. 

Seriously. Because I’m always, always, always telling my kids to think before they speak – or in this case, write. Or text. 

Ugh. When will the sickness end? 

For more than a month, at least one of my kiddos has been ill at least one day a week. Not with seasonal or H1N1 flu, but just with the regular crud kids get. 

First of all, you should never write something for publication when you’re PMSing, but what’s a girl to do when she’s got a deadline? 

So here goes: I don’t like hanging out with chicks, OK?  

If you’re a real soccer mom, you know me. 

I’m the mom who pulls up late to practice, slows down to an idle long enough to let one kid out of the car and yells “I’ll pick you up after practice” as I squeal out of the parking lot.  

Have you ever looked at your family through someone else’s eyes? 

It doesn’t always inspire a Hallmark moment, let me tell you. 

Last week, the Today show did a story about when you know your kid is old enough to walk to school alone. 

Forget walking to school. How about riding the school bus? 

Last spring, my mom broke the news to me. 

“They’ve canceled ‘Guiding Light,’ “ she said, in that same tone she uses to break the news that someone we know has cancer. 

Yes, people, that’s right. The Beems have the cooties. 

Otherwise, you’d be reading a really well-reasoned treatise on community gardens.  

Here’s a fun game to play when you’re stuck in line with your kiddos at the DMV or waiting for a delayed flight and your 6-year-old’s on meltdown or you’re driving across Kansas and your 13-year-old’s sarcasm level is about to make your head explode: 

Imagine what breed every member of the family would be if you were all dogs. 

I always thought I was a fairly cool mom, one you wouldn’t be embarrassed to take with you to the mall or Back to School Night. 

I’m no prude. I don’t wear “mom” jeans. I’ve allowed my older kids to have birthday sleepovers every year since they were 7. 

If ABC still were putting on afterschool specials, I’d have a great title and plotline for one: “Maggie Goes to Middle School: One girl’s struggle to remain true to herself.” 

Oh, the drama. 

On Monday, I reported for jury duty. 

I tried to have a good attitude about it. It is our civic duty to serve if we’re qualified. And if I ever find myself in a situation where I’m facing a jury, God fordbid, I’d want to be judged by 12 people who weren’t sitting there under duress. 

When I first started writing in this space, hardly anyone in my family noticed. 

Some couldn’t figure out what a blog was. Some thought the infrequent blurb pulled from my post and run in FYI below my photo was my blog. Some aren’t too sure how to turn on a computer. 

Summer’s almost over.  

Three weeks from today, my kiddos will be half-way through their first week of school.  

On Tuesday morning, Maggie watched the Today show while I fixed her a bowl of oatmeal. 

Pretty soon, one of the morning’s top stories replayed: the Chris Brown apology video. 

This week, while I was doing a little frantic research trying to figure out what to write about, I came across this BBC article about a British OB who says that the pain of childbirth is a good thing, that women should embrace it and learn from it and be one with the pain and smile and blah blah blah. 

I broke my pencil while I was reading it.  

Sometimes I think I’ll change my name to something like “Princess” or “Your Highness.” 

Then when the kids come roaring into the house in need and scream my name instead of doing 30 seconds of recon to find out where I am, they’d be yelling, “Your Hiiiiiighnessssss!” instead of “Moooommmmm!” 

We had this great big old Silver maple in our yard. It was a beaut. 

Gnarled trunk, arching canopy. It made our front yard a haven for hostas and impatiens. The tree was there long before our 70-year-old Cape Cod, so the front walk curved around its trunk. I planted crocus bulbs in the little hollows around the base, and in spring little bursts of purple appeared before the tree leafed out. 

If you want a visual of America’s obesity epidemic, visit the public pool in my neck of the woods.  

Have you ever seen a 300-pound woman in a bikini? Little is left to the imagination. 

A friend fortuitously forwarded a funny  e-mail about birth order yesterday. 

It was fortuitous because I had no freaking idea what I was going to write about today. I’ve been too busy wrangling kids and cleaning up messes and trying to get the summer groove going that doing any actual work is the farthest thing from my mind. 

He ran with the confidence of one who’s certain his mother is running after him. 

The toddler grinned impishly as he ran past, occasionally looking over his shoulder for the adult who would soon be chasing behind. 

You know, a big chunk of parenting is about modeling appropriate behavior in front of your kids. So you can avoid the “do as I say, not as I do” trap, right? 

I’ve always prided myself on that, except for the swearing habit that I cannot break. But I figure dropping a few F-bombs is minor compared to making meth or kicking the dog. I try to do the right thing and teach my kids to be kind and empathetic by striving to be that way myself. 

Last night was our daughter’s fifth-grade graduation. 

Not so long ago I sneered at those kinds of milestones as contrived opportunities to emote. I held the same attitude as Bob Parr, aka Mr. Incredible, who scorns the idea of his son’s elementary school graduation. 

This weekend, my hubby will take his baby to the lake.  

Um, I’m not talking about me. I’m referring to his boat. 

I’ve been itching for days to post something about Elizabeth Edwards and her new book, Resilience. And what I want to say is this: Enough already with the bashing.  

First, a disclosure: I like Democrats. They’re my peeps. I’m not a registered party member, but I’ve pretty much voted along Democratic lines since my first presidential election in 1988, when I voted for Bruce Babbitt on Super Tuesday. He got my vote because he hosted Saturday Night Live, and he actually dropped out of the race before Super Tuesday, but I voted absentee because I was in college so I had cast my vote ahead of time. Yeah, I’m deep. 

What is a mother if not a font of advice? 

There’s nothing like a garage sale to remind you that people are cheap and generally rude. 

This past Saturday, the Girl Scout troop my sister and I run had a rummage sale. 

So I read about this woman who ate her baby’s placenta.  

I’m pretty sure it’s real, although I read about it on the Internet. But I checked Snopes and all the other sites where you can check a story’s veracity. A friend sent me the link to the web site Mom*Logic, which bills itself as “Real stories. Real advice. Real moms.” It was posted April 10, 2009. 

We were watching the news the other night when a photo of the cute new Obama dog flashed on the screen. 

My husband stopped unloading the dishwasher to watch the story about Bo, the 6-month-old black-and-white Portuguese water dog who arrived at the White House yesterday. 

If you heard a loud noise early Tuesday morning – sort of like a primal scream – it was me. 

That was my reaction to the latest salvo in the grossly overwrought and completely fabricated Mommy Wars.  

Today begins National Child Abuse Prevention Month. And it reminds me of a story. 

When my older son was in third grade, I dropped by his school one day for lunch.  

Dear George: 

How do you like St. Louis? How’s the filming going? I hope you get a chance to go by the Broadway Oyster Bar and Crown Candy while you’re there, although I know you tend toward more trendy spots like Niche. 

I happened on to an interesting and sometimes heated discussion over at www.twittermoms.com a few weeks back.  

The topic was diversity in schools,  and it’s a topic near and dear to my heart, so it piqued my interest. 

In light of the present dismal economy and fragile world we live in, I question the wisdom of Mattel Inc. making such a big whoop-de-doo about Barbie on her birthday. 

She hit the big 5-0 on Monday and got a facelift. And a tattoo. And let’s face it, she got a boob job and probably lipo, too.

You know how I’m fond of saying kids don’t come with an instruction manual? Still true. 

But they do come with a helpline. It’s called Parents as Teachers. 

This is so not what I was going to write about this week. 

I planned a really thought-provoking post that would stimulate conversation about a pressing social issue. 

My great-grandparents had a Ricky-and-Lucy sort of bedroom arrangement – they slept in twin beds. 

Even when I was a little kid, I thought that was kind of weird. My parents slept in one double bed. Their parents only had one bed in their bedrooms, too.  So I remember wondering why Grandma Kate and Grandpa Chet didn’t just have one big bed. 

But man, did we ever think we did. 

Remember the orgasmic coverage of his quest to win eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, a feat he accomplished? Remember how he broke seven world records and was dubbed by sportscasters and other talking heads the “greatest athlete of all time?” Remember all those stories about his underage boozing? 

I had an epiphany the other day. 

I realized I don’t have to have a sick kid around to watch Arthur on PBS. It’s OK if I watch it by myself – although it makes for better discussion points if at least one of my offspring watches it with me. 

We always said, my husband and I, that we'd get our oldest a cell phone when it became a necessity, not a want. We believe in delayed gratification.

We weathered quite a bit of whining and begging and stomping of feet and declarations of our status as the worst parents ever after we made that decree, but we stuck to our guns. And eventually, Joe got the picture and resigned himself to the wait.

I pretty much stumbled into having kids and waltzed through my first pregnancy with very little thought to the work that lay ahead. Only during the last few weeks, when I took Lamaze, did I wonder, “Was this really a good idea?”  

And then afterward, I decided it was, although there were so many things no one told me. Or maybe  they did and I didn’t listen. 

So what did my husband and I spend much of Monday doing?

We worried about an ongoing controversy embroiling our 11-year-old daughter’s basketball team.

I had a panic attack yesterday. 

It was long overdue and in fact had been building since the day in 2002 that we welcomed our youngest child, Tom, into the family. 

We haven’t quite mailed all our Christmas cards yet. 

So if you’re someone I usually send a card to and you haven’t yet received one from the Beems, don’t despair. It’s on its way. 

When I was a kid, my sisters and I devoured the Sears Wish Book each year.  

We circled the items we wanted and dog-eared the pages.  We dreamed of how much better our lives would be if only the Barbie Dream House sat in our bedrooms. And how great it would be if the doll named Tuesday Taylor, whose scalp swiveled so she could be either blond or brunette, could live in that dream house with her Barbie sisters (because we weren’t allowed to have Ken dolls – that’s another story.) 

This economy stinks, yes. And my chosen career field is imploding, true. 

But I’m not too worried because my kids and I dreamed up a new reality show early Tuesday morning: Extreme Parenting: Stomach Flu. 

My part in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Goo began in mid-November with Margo’s innocent cyber query and ended hours ago with three loaves of bread stuck in their pans. 

But first, the beginning… 

NOTE: Today is the Twittermom Blog Swap. I’m swapping blogs with dustbunny, a mommy who blogs on mybaby.com. She’s posting something I wrote on her blog site, and vice versa. We’re like mom-blogger exchange students. Don't forget to check out my post at dustbunny's site -- just click here. Her readers will be visiting Mom2mom!

And so below, please enjoy the story of dustbunny’s search for the perfect non-mommy jeans:

A few weeks back, my husband mentioned that his hope for Thanksgiving weekend is that we can get the outside Christmas lights up. And maybe put everything else up, too. 

Whoa there, Hoss. Has he noticed that the yard still is covered in leaves that haven’t been mulched or raked or bagged? That there are rotting pumpkins out front and some wooden chairs that need to be winterized out back?  

 I took the new kitten to the veterinarian for her second set of shots. 

“And I need to schedule her spay,” I said, cuddling the little sweetie under my chin. She purred contentedly. 

I know -- the alternative is worse. Got it.

But is there some reason a person has to make a big freaking deal out of her birthday every stinking year?

My immediate hope for the Age of Obama?   

That millions of American white kids (and their parents) will recognize that middle-class families like the Huxtables and the Baxters and Chris Rock's fictional family do exist in real life, not just on television. 

So it’s been a year since The Star gave moms a place to vent.  

Wow, does time ever fly when you spend your days waiting to see how many hits you’re getting on your blog or whether that political bomb you just threw will tick off that one mom you always argue with. 

Man, the smell was horrid.  

I kept blaming everything from the dogs to someone’s shoes to the malodorous basement, and I can’t tell you how many times I took out the trash. But the smell remained. 

I am a Girl Scout leader.

It’s kind of a joke in my extended family that I hold that title now because I wasn’t the most exemplary Girl Scout.

Sometimes I feel like we’re living The Manchurian Candidate.  

Not the black-and-white version with Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, but the 2004 remake with Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep.  

I’ve been a mom for, what? Eleven, 12 years now.  And dinnertime still sneaks up on me. 

It’s not even that I have an issue with cooking, because I don’t.  I love to cook. I read cookbooks for fun. I grow my own herbs.  

If the Democrats don’t win the White House, there’s no telling what our oldest kid’s gonna do. 

Not that he’s some kind of Dem operative-in-the-making. He’s just tired of his team losing all the time. 

Sorry, but I’m going to mention Sarah Palin in as many headlines and blogs as I can in a shameless attempt to attract readers to my blog…

But seriously, Tasha’s Friday blog made me think about my own nagging habits. Are they effective? Could I do better? And what is the proper way to nag?

I’m talking her honest-to-God laundry here, people, not some smarmy secret that needs to be expunged. 

She’s got five kids and a husband who sounds like he’s not home much, between riding snowmobiles all over Hell’s half-acre and shooting and gutting moose and working one week on, one week off, in an oil field in northern Alaska. 

Talk about your teachable moments. These are the days, my friends.

Think about it. The first African-American presidential candidate from a major political party. The first Republican female vice-presidential candidate. Two wars. Terrible economy.

I’m in a mood to vent, because if I don’t I might choke someone.

I think it has something to do with the end of summer and the nagging feeling that Christmas is coming and I’m already behind. Plus the 11-year-old’s having a birthday sleepover this weekend, and that scares me. And I’m hormonal.

Now that the Olympics are over, I feel safe in saying that the hype totally turned me off.

I hadn’t heard that much hyperbole since, oh, I don’t know…last year’s college football season.

My baby went to kindergarten yesterday.

It was a day I’d been waiting for with varying degrees of trepidation and relief.  But as I watched him walk ahead of me into the classroom, I felt a tug. Apron strings? Umbilical cord?

...especially one you didn't know?

Sure, it’s easy to give lip service and say you’d do the right thing, but really. Be painfully honest. Would you?

My 5-year-old’s face lit up with wonder as he leaned forward to share a secret. 

“Did you know Dad can light a match by farting?” he asked, his blue eyes wide. 

Around these parts, everyone knows I hate spiders. 

Hate isn’t even strong enough. Fear, loathe, despise. They haven’t even invented a word to tell you how much my life would be better if the things didn’t exist. 

Here’s something that’s been rubbing me wrong for years: Why do women think you have to have a party to sell something? 

You know what I’m talking about. Purse parties. Make-up parties. Pampered Chef parties. Tupperware, Tastefully Simple, PartyLite. Passion parties, for crying out loud!  

You ever hear a song that rockets you backward in time? 

It happened Sunday night. I was stuffing a load of whites into the washer when I heard it: the holy, lilting strains of a song by John Michael Talbot. My blood turned to ice, and my chest constricted. 

Before there was Joe or Maggie or Tom or even a big black dog named Sally living in our home, there were Cleo and Elliott. 

They were our first babies, the kind who enter a married couple’s life when they’re setting up housekeeping, the sort that fulfills the need to nurture, keeping the babies at bay for a while. 

Later this month, my husband and I will celebrate 17 years of marriage. 

But these days – and let’s face it, for a good part of the last 12 years – I’ve felt like a single parent most of the time. 

So the kids and I are at our city pool/water extravaganza a few weeks back, and I’m doing some people watching. Sunglasses make it that much easier. 

And I notice some cute young skinny suburban mommies in their bikinis. And I’m feeling somewhat snarky, right, so I’m thinking to myself, guess if I would have had my babies when I was 12 I’d still be able to wear a two-piece, too. 

Our oldest child turns 12 today. 

He’s not here, either. He’s at camp. Yeah, I’m feeling guilty about that. Months ago, when I registered him, I got out my calendar and showed him the week he’d be gone and the fact that his birthday fell smack in the middle of it. 

It was vintage Dad. 

Last Wednesday, when our youngest split open his head while performing an outlaw bike trick, I clutched the 5-year-old’s head with my bare hands and screamed for help. 

A week ago, I was so mad I could have screamed. 

But I was on an airplane and didn’t want to be taken down by an air marshal, so I refrained. 

So gas is $4 a gallon, and I’m tooling around town in a Suburban, for crying out loud.

I put three-quarters of a tank in the thing the other day, and it cost about $75. And I was at Sam’s Club, enjoying a 5-cent-a-gallon discount. 

In a grossly misguided attempt to keep the Santa myth alive, in 2006 we bought Joe a Daisy BB gun. 

This was against Mrs. Claus’ better judgment and over and above her warnings of impending doom, but Mr. Claus kept remembering fondly his summer days spent with his cousins shooting at (and mostly missing, he assures me) starlings in his beloved grandfather’s backyard. 

You know, I’m not a violent person. 

I preach pacifism and strive to keep my kids from using their fists to solve disagreements. I don’t like to kill anything, even spiders, which I hate. And I’m totally against football and WWF. 

Ever since the new year began, it’s nothing but “40 years ago this” and “40 years ago that.”    

Do they have to keep reminding us that 1968 was 40 years ago? Some of us already know that, for crying out loud.   

Over the last year or so, there’s been lots in the news about boot camps for troubled kids.

Last week, the U.S. House again held hearings on the issue, and a bill there would amp up camp regulations, which right now vary from state to state. 

God, but I was relieved to hear on NPR that it’s all right for kids to use swear words. 

I might be paraphrasing. But that was the gist of a Morning Edition story in late March. (Check it out here.)

From the beginning of the teeth-whitening craze, I’ve resisted. 

Not that I’m averse to white teeth. But personally, I don’t think everyone needs to look like everyone else. 

It’s April 9. Do you know what your school-aged child is doing? 

Probably taking a test – if you live in Missouri and your sweetie is in any grade between third and 11^th. 

Here’s what I wonder: What do my kids say about our family when they’re around their friends? 

How do they characterize what goes on in our house? When they’re going somewhere with a buddy, do they get diarrhea of the mouth, telling all about the argument Matt and I had while we cleaned out the basement or the time the toilet upstairs overflowed and I screamed like a little girl or the time we let them watch The Thomas Crown Affair because we didn’t know about the stairway scene?

So on Monday, the last day of spring break for my kids, Maggie and I left home at 7:30 a.m. for a physical therapy appointment. (Long story, probably for a later blog.) We were late, of course, because I’d promised her I’d go through the McDonald’s drive-through on the way. And we were driving on fumes because apparently I’m the only one who fills up my car, even if I’m not the one driving it when the red warning light comes on. 

Because we were late for the hourlong appointment, we got out late. And the car still needed gas. So we broke several laws as we headed for my mother-in-law’s house to pick up the boys. Joe and Maggie had their six-month dental check-ups at 10 a.m. After much yelling and teeth-gnashing by Tom, who didn’t even have a dental appointment, we tore out of the in-laws’ driveway and headed for the dentist. 

Parenting is full of opportunities to prove yourself a ginormous hypocrite. You know, “Do as I say, not as I did.”

Thank God eating crow isn’t something you actually do, or that would be just about the only thing I ever have for dinner. 

MONDAY --  A girl called around 4:30 p.m. today for Joe, who took the phone upstairs. He was back in about two minutes, and a bit later he came into the kitchen where I was cooking dinner.   

“You know that call?” he said. “That girl told me Danielle wants to break up with me.”  

As if I needed one more reason to beat myself up over my mothering skills. 

I’ve worried for years because I didn’t breastfeed my first child. Then I wonder if I read enough to my second when she was younger. And then there’s my salty language. Sometimes I drop F-bombs. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmothers lately.

They both died five years ago, in 2003. Both had breast cancer. They come to my mind often anyway, but these days, with a strong woman running for president and pundits debating whether the United States could handle her, my grandmothers visit my thoughts more often.

I've refrained from using my Wednesday blog as a venting vehicle, but no more. Today is the day I pour out my pent-up anguish, the day I regurgitate the minutia of life in the Beem house, the day I bash a few people. 

What is the point of technology if it doesn't work, I ask you? How is it making our lives easier if, when it doesn't work, we have to spend hours upon hours on the phone with people on another continent trying to figure out what we did wrong? Why? Why? Why? 

When the phone company had a monopoly everything was the same most places(bad--no competition).  Now there are 'telecomm providers' out the wazoo(good--competition is good for us).  But the old phone company never broke down(almost never,anyway good!)  Now, not all providers are created equal, but there IS competition (back to Good, again).  So if they break down occasionally or frequently --your choice--it's just an example of the American Dream.  We are only entitled to the PURSUIT of happiness, not happiness itself.

Time was when I thought childbirth was the most painful part of being a parent. 

Nope. That’s the easy part. Even 12 hours of excruciating back labor doesn’t compare with watching your child learn life’s lessons. 

So tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. What’s the big deal?

Saturday morning the phone rang. On the other end of the line, a young female voice asked to speak to my 11-year-old son.

I looked at the caller I.D. and didn’t recognize the name, so I asked for hers. “Megan,” she said. 

Would you lie to your kids? 

That question came up in our house the day after Christmas. I was in bed, trying to catch a few extra minutes of shut-eye, when a tornado burst out of Maggie’s room and landed on my bed.  She lay there with her arms folded and declared, “I don’t think it’s right for parents to lie to their kids.” 

I’ve been feeling my age of late.

Not that it’s a bad age. But when you’re 39 and you have a 5-year-old, you spend a lot of time with other mommies who are a lot younger than you, especially if you live outside those Kansas City neighborhoods with older moms.

Want to know the scariest place on the Internet? MySpace.com.

Certain moments in your child’s life beget anticipation: the first word, the first step, the first day of school.

I heard the screams but thought they were coming from the television. It certainly didn’t sound like my 5-year-old, and he and his 11-year-old brother were the only two in the living room. The screams continued and got louder, so I went to investigate.

On the living room floor I found Joe, my 11-year-old son, writhing in pain, his 5-year-old brother, Tom, sitting idly by, a look of sweet innocence on his face.

I’m appalled at myself as I type these words – Jamie Lynn Spears – thus adding to the frenzy surrounding the young actress and her impending motherhood.

Yet I can’t deny that as news broke last week of Jamie Lynn’s pregnancy, I paused in my rush to put breakfast on the table to gaze at the talking head reporting about this latest Spears foible. I regret to say it wasn’t the first time that news from the Spears world stopped me in my tracks. When her sister, Britney, was in the throes of her latest custody battle, I worried about her sons, a lump forming in my throat as I watched a clip of Brit driving her car while her little boys held hands in the back seat.

 Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of. -- Benjamin Franklin

When I was a kid, I often heard adults gripe about their kids’ homework, especially math. Everyone talked about “new math” and how different it was from the old math.

I remember thinking, “Math is math is math. How different can it be? Numbers don’t change.” And my dad was a math teacher, so he could do all the stuff I was working on.

Children don’t come with an owner’s manual, they say.

I’m on record that I’m against using the phrase “Mommy Wars,” and this is why: There aren’t any “Daddy Wars.”

Comes now Thanksgiving, a holiday that should be filled with family and love and joy and all that’s right in the world, a once-yearly chance to express gratitude for what we have without the pressure of buying presents.

What am I thankful for this year? I’m thankful the big dinner won’t be at our house. Ever. Again.

Here's the scenario:

You're driving at least two kids to some activity. In the back seat, they begin discussing what So-and-So wore to school that day. Their voices escalate, and suddenly you feel like you're in the middle of a Hannah Montana episode, and you're channeling Billy Ray Cyrus. It's all, "And she was like...", "And I said...", " "I know you didn't!" and "Oh, yeah. I went there."

I'm a woman on the edge, and if this week doesn't end soon there's no telling how much candy I might eat to get me through it.

It began last Sunday. My husband left the country on a business trip. No biggie. I fly solo a lot. But almost immediately, I realized the 16-year-old cat wasn't doing so well. She was lethargic, more than usual. So all day I fretted about whether to take her to an emergency vet or wait until Monday to take her to our usual doctor. I opted for Monday.

Hello. My name is Kate, and I drive a Suburban.

I also love the Earth and voted for Al Gore and buy fluorescent light bulbs and make my own compost and try to recycle and attempt to xeriscape. But I can’t figure out how to transport all my kids and the extra children I always end up with in a more fuel-efficient, environmentally friendly car.