The White House and the winter garden. Plus: The Roundup

Last week's excursion to the White House didn't end indoors. After the small roundtable discussion with Michelle Obama, the other invited journalists and I joined a couple hundred teachers and school officials on the White House South lawn to celebrate the winners of the Healthier U.S. School Challenge.

On the South Lawn, October 17, 2011.

After milling around and munching on apples, White House chef Sam Kass took us down to the official White House garden for an exclusive tour. You can read about it on Yahoo! Shine, of course: The White House and the winter garden: Eating local all year long. My favorite part was getting to snack on pineapple basil blossoms and learning about some of the Thomas Jefferson heirloom seeds that they had planted, courtesy of Monticello. Here are a few pictures from that tour:

A slate tablet in the garden. (Photo: Lylah M. Alphonse)

Part of the White House garden. (Photo: Lylah M. Alphonse)

White House chef Sam Kass with the Thomas Jefferson fig tree. (Photo: Lylah M. Alphonse)

Chef Kass picks one of the last of the pumpkins. (Photo: Lylah M. Alphonse)

The White House garden, with the Washington Monument in the background. (Photo: Lylah M. Alphonse)

And now, The Roundup:


On Yahoo! Shine:

• Michelle Obama on the things that matter most to moms
• The White House and the winter garden: Eating local all year long
• Missing baby Lisa Irwin's mom admits she was drunk when her baby disappeared
• Gifted child? Study shows kids IQs can change during the teen years
• What, no rapture again? Maybe the Apocalypse is taking place on Wall Street
• U.S. troops in Iraq will be home for the holidays, Obama says

On Work It Mom!:

• Juggling work and family when you're away on business

On 4 Kids or More:

• What's your go-to meal when you don't have time to cook?

On the Savvy Source for Parents:

• Kid-friendly haunts in the Greater Boston area

Can lingerie ads also be sexist? Plus: The Roundup

Supermodel Gisele Bundchen's latest ads for Hope lingerie have set off a firestorm in her native Brazil, where the country's first female president, Dilma Rousseff, has denounced them as sexist and demanded that Brazil's National Council for Advertising Self-Regulation investigate the campaign.

You can view all three of the ads over at Yahoo! Shine, but here's the gist: Each one starts off with the Brazilian bombshell dowdily dressed, looking contrite and just a little upset, confessing something that could infuriate her husband (she crashed the car, she spent too much money shopping, her mother is coming to stay for while).  Then the word "errado"—Portuguese for "wrong"—flashes on the screen. The next shot shows Bundchen making the same confession, but while standing in a come-hither pose, wearing nothing but high heels, a push-up bra, and panties (and some major confidene). A bell dings, and the word "certo"—"right"—appears.

"You're a Brazilian woman. Use your charm," a man's voice says in Portuguese as Gisele struts across the screen in skimpy lingerie and sky-high stilettos.

"The campaign promotes the misguided stereotype of a woman as a sexual object of her husband and ignores the major advances we have achieved in deconstructing sexist practices and thinking," Rousseff's Secretariat for Women's Politics said in a statement. They also accused Hope Lingerie of promoting "discriminatory content against women," which is against Brazil's constitution.

So, is the ad sexist and exploitative, as President Rousseff claims? Personally, I don't think so. For one thing, she's shilling lingerie (and her own lingerie line, at that). For another, she's the highest-paid supermodel out there right now, and Hope Lingerie paid her a bundle.

Click over to Shine and watch the videos at "Gisele Bundchen and lingerie: Are these ads sexist?". What do you think?

And now, The Roundup:


On Yahoo! Shine:

• Paul McCartney marries U.S. heiress Nancy Shevell: Love is all you need
• California officially bans taning bed use by young teens
• Woman gives birth after running a marathon: What did you do just before you went into labor?
• Overweight women need to be smarter, men richer in order to stay attractive, study says
• Exercise, healthy eating linked to early menopause
• The Wall Street protests: Signs of the occupation
• Gisele Bundchen and lingerie: Are these ads sexist?
• House passes Protect Life Act. Democrats ask, "What about jobs?"

On Work It Mom!:

• What's on your "ignore" list?

On 4 Kids or More:

• Staying home with your kids: Career choice or moral imperative?

Can you be happy at work and at home?

Like many working moms, public relations and marketing professional Caitlin Friedman is seeking to simplify. "I want to keep working, but I need more flexibility!" she says. She and her business partner, Kimberly Yorio, run TC Media in New York City and are the coauthors of the "Girl's Guide" series of books. Their latest, Happy at Work, Happy at Home: The Girl's Guide to Being a Working Mom, offers hints and advice for making the most of your work-life juggle.

"I have a boy and a girl, who just entered Kindergarten this fall," she said during an email interview (you can read the entire Q&A here). "Which is one of the reasons I need to simplify my life a little and start working from home. It's been hard to do everything, as I am sure all of your readers can relate!" Here's her advice on ways to be happy at work and happy at home, and what inspired her to write about it.

Selling your home? 10 staging hints that will make it stand out

According to Realtor.com, there are more than 4.1 million homes for sale right now in the United States. Here are 10 ways you can make yours stand out in the crowd.

Go for neutral
Remove highly personal items like family photos and artwork your kids brought home from school, and consider painting any brightly colored walls a more neutral shade. Personality is important, but you want prospective buyers to be able to imagine themselves in the space without feeling like they’re invading yours.

Spruce things up
Shabby furniture should get a makeover. Sure Fit (http://www.surefit.com) suggests covering up worn, outdated, or loud furniture with tailored or fitted slipcovers in a neutral shade. New area rugs (to cover worn or stained spots on the floor), throw pillows, and flower arrangements can make a space feel fresh without costing a fortune.

Working from home with (or in spite of) your kids

My husband was out of town all of last week, and this week my youngest kids are out of preschool, so it seems like a good time to revisit the whole "how on earth do I work when I have to look after my kids at the same time" idea.

Here's how I've been managing. Without adversely affecting a.) my liver or b.) my reputation.

The ins and outs of affiliate marketing

This week I'm over at Work It, Mom!, writing about the different types of work-from-home programs and how they operate. For parents who want to earn money and build a business without sacrificing too much family time, direct-marketing programs seem ideal. But with so many to choose from, how do you know which one will work for you -- and which ones might not work at all?

Back to school: Product picks from Write Edit Repeat (and a chance to win $150)

Over at Work It, Mom!, I'm pulling together slideshows the coolest back-to-school products, whether your kids are heading off to kindergarten or off to college. Take a look:

Back to school gear for elementary school kids

Heading off to college? Bring these 10 things with you.

And don't forget their teachers or day care providers! 10 gifts teachers and caregivers will love.

Write. Edit. Repeat. readers also have a chance to win a $150 Back-to-School Gift Card from Amazon.com. Spend about five minutes (or less, really) taking this survey from Unicast about your back to school shopping, and you can win one of 10 prizes. The survey closes at 8 p.m. (eastern time) on Friday, Aug. 20. (Winners will be emailed on Monday Aug. 23.) The survey is anonymous, though you will have to give your email address in order to be notified if you win one of the prizes.

Here’s the link to the survey: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22B385KB4BX

Why feel guilty about it if it helps you cope?

I was outside chatting with friends as we watched our 5- and 3-year-olds carom around the playground, when one of them mentioned that she'd been watching the SciFi channel lately, and it was her guilty pleasure.

"Oh, that's not a guilty pleasure," I quipped. "A guilty pleasure is a 'Real Housewives of Where Ever" marathon or watching multiple episodes of 'The Girls Next Door.' While drunk. SciFi is science plus fiction. That's multitasking." We all laughed, and the conversation took a turn and went elsewhere. But still, the ridiculousness of my quip made me wonder: What makes a guilty pleasure a guilty pleasure?

Should we be unitasking instead of multitasking?

There's a really interesting piece over in our articles section at Work It, Mom!, about unitasking instead of multitasking, and I'm taking a closer look at it over at The 36-Hour Day.

It's often said that multitasking is how working moms manage to get it all done. But researchers say that our ability to do so may just be a myth. And unitasking is kind of at the root of the whole Fly Lady way of cleaning and decluttering -- focus on one task, do it for a set amount of time, and then move on to the next thing. We know that unitasking works -- at least, I can see how easily it works in terms of doing the laundry or tidying up the house. But could I apply it to my to-do list? Or, better still, my hours at the office?

More proof that time flies

My 3-year-old woke me up one recent morning, saying he was hungry. Which would have been OK if

1.) I hadn’t gone to bed at nearly 2 a.m.
2.) I hadn’t gone to bed at nearly 2 a.m. because I was working
3.) My husband hadn’t gone to bed at 9 p.m.
4.) My husband had regained consciousness quickly enough to offer to get up with him (Hahaha! No. He sleeps like he's made of concrete.)
5.) My 3-year-old hadn’t trotted in at not-quite-6 a.m.

So I got up, coughing (I’ve got a cold. Yes, of course I went to work later that day) and struggled to find the sleeves of my robe and found socks for my feet and stumbled downstairs with my youngest boy, who was clutching both a small stuffed leopard that he insists is a baby jaguar, and a large stuffed border collie that is nearly as big as he is. He requested “Cimmanin Tohst.” Which I made. Which he, sitting at the table, then didn't eat, preferring to chatter on about super heroes and puppies and whether maybe there could be a super hero who actually WAS a puppy and wouldn’t that be so, so, so cool Mama?

When I am under the weather, or stressed, or, in this case, both, four hours of sleep is nowhere near enough. I was cranky and resentful. I had so much work to do. I made coffee and sat down at the table with him and nodded and coughed. And realized: Someday, sooner than I think, I’m going to look back on this moment -- sleep-deprived, borderline sick, to-do list already long -- and I am going to miss it.

Kagan's nomination shows that life experience counts

I've heard a lot of women who are trying to re-enter the workforce worry that they aren't qualified to do much after years of being at home. And I've heard a lot of women who are thinking about switching careers mid-stream worry that they're not qualified to do any job other than the one they're trying to get out of. But the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court is proof positive that one doesn't need to have the perfect work experience in order to be considered qualified for a given job.

While most -- OK, all -- moms I know aren't gunning for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, there is a parallel, which I mentioned over at The 36-Hour Day and which they're talking about over at Babble Magazine: Much of the work we do as a parents helps us hone the skills that apply directly to the work we want to do for pay.

Some of those opposed to Kagan's nomination are focusing on comments she made about the Constitution while working as a clerk for Thurgood Marshall. Others take issue with the fact that, while Dean of Harvard Law School, she barred military recruiters from campus because of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. Still others insist that she's not qualified because, even though she has worked in all three branches of government, has spent decades studying Constitutional law, and currently represents the government before the Supreme Court, she has never actually been a judge.

But Kagan isn't the first Supreme Court nominee to not have served as a judge prior to nomination -- not by a long shot. Her former boss, Thurgood Marshall, was a lawyer when he was nominated. Of the eight Supreme Court judges nominated by President Kennedy, President Johnson, and President Nixon, five of them (White, Goldberg, Fortas, Powell, and Rehnquist) hadn't served as judges prior to their nominations. In fact, 14 of the 16 Chief Justices were not judges prior to appointment. And they did just fine.

As work-at-home, stay-at-home, entrepreneurial, or part-time working moms, we've gained skills acting as the CEOs of our families that more than qualify us for the workforce at large. If you're thinking of a career switch, don't justify your decision to leave; focus on the skills you have that make you an asset elsewhere. Rejoining the workforce? Instead of dreading having to explain that so-called resume gap, think about how you can apply the skills you honed at home: scheduling, multitasking, personnel management, communication, budgeting... the list goes on and on.

Elena Kagan is inspirational for what she's already accomplished, regardless of what happens with this nomination.

Parents who are working in so many different ways: What skills have you already gained? And how do they apply to your job, or to what you want to do next?

A Q&A with the CEO of UNICEF, Caryl Stern

As the Managing Editor at Work It, Mom! -- which was recently ranked No. 1 among the top 100 most engaged and influential moms groups by social media platform Groupable -- I'm lucky enough to have a chance to chat with some pretty inspirational women. Last week, I interviewed Caryl Stern, President and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF.

Caryl M. Stern began her career in the art world. "I started out with a degree in studio art, and assumed I would spend most of my adult life creating works of art," she says. "I have been fortunate to have actually lived out the 'creating' part -- but not the 'works of art!' " After returning to school and earning her Masters degree, she spent the next 10 years working in higher education, most recently as Dean of Students at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, N.Y. and teaching at the graduate school at Manhattanville College.

She left higher education to join the Anti-Defamation League as the inaugural director of ADL's A World of Difference Institute. She went on to become the ADL's Director of Education and then the organization’s Senior Associate National Director and Chief Operating Officer. Three and a half years ago, she joined the US Fund for UNICEF as their Chief Operating Officer, and was selected to be the President and CEO a year later.

"I was drawn to the US Fund for UNICEF because of my commitment to children, to education, and to equity," Stern says. "As the child of a woman who survived the Holocaust in Austria by being sent here to the US at the age of 6 with her 4-year-old brother, I learned early on what a difference one person can, should, must make in the life of a child. I am proud to be in a position to help make that difference for literally thousands of children."

Why is work-life balance so difficult for women in the U.S.? Stern says that we still think we can have it all. "This is not true; you do have to give something up to get most of it!" she says. "The US does not always create work environments that value family first concepts."

Here's an excerpt from the interview:

The recent case of a 7-year-old boy who was returned to Russia by his American adoptive mother has had a huge impact in the international adoption community. What do you think needs to change in order to prevent situations like this?

The world needs to treat adoption as the serious matter it is, insuring that the circumstances that lead up to the availability of a child for adoption, as well as the circumstances of the potential adoptive parents, and all that strands between them, meet the standards set out by the Hague Convention. Children are not products and must not be treated as returnable objects. Approximately 2.8 percent (732,000) of all children in Russia are living without parental care. Some 156,000 are living in institutions. In most cases -- about 80 percent -- these children have at least one parent alive. The priority for these children is to provide the services and support to safely move them back into family care. The vast majority of children in institutional care are over 5 years old. UNICEF supports adoption provided that safeguards are in place to protect children, birth families, and adoptive parents. UNICEF’s focus in the Russian Federation and other countries is to support Governments to strengthen families and their capacity to look after their children. UNICEF works with governments to diversify social services, develop day care services for working parents, offer counseling for families in crisis, inclusive education for children with disabilities, family friendly health services to soon-to-become parents and services to improve parental skills.

you can read the entire Q&A here.

Earth Day 2010: 10 ways to go green at home or at work

Earlier this week at The 36-Hour Day, I wrote about how my husband is far more crunch granola than I am. In fact, by comparison, I'm just a little bit cripsy.

A couple of years ago, we set out fruit trees and expanded our garden — or, rather, he did, given that I kill plants just by looking at them. My husband runs his Suburban on a combination of diesel and waste vegetable oil (no, it doesn’t smell like french fries) and fantasizes about having a wind turbine on our property. (Not going to happen, though. Two reasons: We don’t get that much wind, and we don’t particularly want to piss off our lovely neighbors.) And, this year, he’s rebuilding the old chicken coop out back, with an eye toward raising up his own flock of dinner. I’ve assured our lovely neighbors that we won’t have roosters (they crow all day, not just in the morning, you know), and I’ve vowed to name each chick after a different recipe. (”Heeeeeeere, Homemade Stock! Bok bok, Sweet-Potato Curry! Where’d you hide your eggs this time, General Tso?”) ... [More]

I am trying to be more green, however. According to the EPA, the environment inside your home is two to five times as polluted as the environment outside -- and we spend about 90 percent of our time indoors. Here are 10 tips, many of them courtesy of my friend Anca Novacovici, founder of Washington, D.C.-based Eco-Coach, for making your home or office more eco-friendly:

Evaluating daycare centers and preschools: What to ask

Once you've figured out what kind of childcare might work best for your family, the challenge is figuring out which provider is the right one for your child. There are some differences between formal daycare centers, in-home daycare providers, and hiring a nanny or babysitter.

If you're going the nanny/babysitter route and aren't sure what to ask during the interview, here are 15 questions to ask. Commercial childcare centers and in-home daycare set-ups have different rules, licencing requirements, and issues to consider, though. Regardless of which type of formal childcare provider you choose, ask the owner or director the following:

1. How the caregivers are trained?
2. Do they receive or pursue ongoing education?
3. What is the staff turnover like?
4. How do they handle behavioral issues and discipline?
5. How do they deal with crying infants?
6. Can you observe the classroom or center before you make your decision?
7. What kind of food/snacks do they provide, and can they give you a menu?
8. Can they accommodate your child's specific dietary needs, if any?
9. Will they provide a criminal background check for staff? (In some jurisdictions, this is required by law; in others, it's optional. You always have the right to request one.)
10. What are the rates and fees?
11. How do you make payments? (Weekly? Monthly? Credit card? Direct withdrawal?)
12. Is coverage available on National holidays?
13. What is their policy on caring for sick children? (Are they sent home if they spike a fever of 100 or more, or is it 101? Are they willing to administer medication if given permission to do so?) 
14. Are children required to nap? Do they have a procedure in place for older kids or children who won't sleep? (Are they allowed to play with quiet toys, for example, or do they turn on a movie?)

For in-home daycares:

1. Is there an open-door policy and can parents drop in unannounced?
2. How long has she been providing care?
3. Is she monitored in any way? If there are inspections, how often and who performs them?
4. How many other children are in her care, and what are their ages?
5. What's the maximum number of children in her care at any one time?
6. Is she at capacity already?
7. What does a typical day look like?
8. Who else will be in house during business hours?
9. Any smokers in the house? If so, are there restrictions on where they smoke?
10. Does she have First Aid and CPR training? When was she last re-certified?
11. Does she provide a contract?
12. Will she provide references from current and past clients?
13. Can you visually inspect sleeping areas, changing areas, and play areas?
14. How will she transport the kids if they leave the premises?
15. Are there pets on the premises?
16. Do the kids watch television while in her care? 

For daycare centers and preschools:

1. What are the staff-to-child ratios?
2. What is the rate of staff turnover?
3. Are the staff members certified in early childhood education?
4. Do the staff members have First Aid and CPR training? How often do they re-train?
5. Do the kids go off the premises at all? How often?
6. Do they mix the age-groups?
7. Is there a formal curriculum?
8. Is there a contract?
9. Can you visually inspect sleeping areas, changing areas, and play areas?
10. Are they fully accredited, or are any requirements in the process of being met?

Babies in the workplace? No, thank you

I'll be on Fox News's national morning program Fox & Friends tomorrow (Friday, March 26) at 7:50 a.m. (NEW TIME!), discussing babies-to-work programs and why I think there are other ways companies, parents, and kids can benefit without bringing infants in to the office. If there's a link to the program after it airs, I'll be sure to update with it here!

Today's post at The 36-Hour Day is about the same subject. Here's an excerpt:

My youngest children are 5 and 3 years old now, but for the first two years of my 5-year-old’s life, she commuted to and from my office nearly every day after my maternity leave was over. But she rarely spent more than a couple of minutes at the office. My husband worked in the same building; my shift ended at 5, his shift started at 5, and we usually met in the parking lot and just switched cars.

When our youngest was born, my husband switched to a day shift just as my maternity leave came to an end, and we had to deal with daycare for the first time. Would I have preferred to take my then 6-month-old son with me to the office, to save on daycare costs or to make breastfeeding easier? Absolutely not. Even at 6 months, my son was active. And, frankly, hilarious and a lot of fun. I would never have been able to get anything done at the office with him there — and neither would any of my coworkers. ... [More]

I know I'm lucky in that my main employer has a very generous maternity leave policy -- generous in terms of holding my job for me for as long as 26 weeks instead of the "up to 12 weeks" mandated by the Family and Medical Leave Act, I mean (the leave is unpaid). I was lucky, too, to be able to cobble together vacation and sick time so I could continue to draw most of a paycheck while I was out of the office -- essential for my family, since I'm the breadwinner. Even if I had been limited to a 12-week leave of absence, though, I doubt I would have taken my babies to the office with me, for the reasons I mention in my post. More likely, my husband would have continued to work nights for a bit longer, and I would continued to work days, and we would have kept up with our parking lot (and local playground) rendezvous.

The discussion is already heading up at The 36-Hour Day... check it out and weigh in: Did you (or would you) go back to work early and bring your newborn with you to the office? Why or why not?

Tricking myself with my to-do list

Last week, I felt defeated by my to-do list.

I slogged through it, item by item, until my eyes were crossing and I was desperate for a break. But by then it was time to head home, and the list, with so many lines still not crossed off, taunted me for my entire commute.

Until I turned in to my driveway and realized that at least half of the things on the list were things I wanted to get done, but couldn't possibly do at work.

Sure, I worked a little of that working mom magic -- namely, I wrote down a couple of things I'd already done that morning and crossed them off a nanosecond later (put gas in the car? Check!). But the laundry? Thawing the meat for dinner? Vacuuming the family room? How could I possibly get those things done from my desk, 40 miles away from my house? Just putting them on my plate was setting myself up for failure -- or, at least, for feeling like one.

I inadvertently sabotage myself like this all the time. Often, it's via my to-do list; in addition to expecting the impossible, I also tend to list things that I want to get done sometime in the near future but can't realistically get done that day, even if I really had a 36-Hour Day at my disposal (example from last week: the six things I need to do to complete a project that's due in late April, for instance). But other times I sabotage myself by thinking I haven't done any work when, really, I've been working non-stop.

I did that just this morning, in fact.

While driving in to the office, I glanced at the clock and wondered how I could have been up for more than four hours already and still have accomplished nothing.

But... I'd actually done a lot with my day already. I'd gotten the kids dressed and fed, their lunches and their school bags packed, and taken them to school. I'd dropped off the dry cleaning, picked up the other dry cleaning, and gone to the bank. I'd cleaned out my (totaled) minivan, signed it over to the insurance company, and extended the contract on the car I was renting. And then I'd started in on my commute. Just because those other tasks weren't part of my paid jobs doesn't mean I didn't get any work done.

When I got to the office, I started writing out my to-do list, as usual. But this time I listed all of the unpaid work I'd already done this morning, and added only the things that I a.) really need to do today and b.) could actually do while at work.

And you know what? The already-completed tasks outnumber the things I have left to do. So instead of feeling defeated, for the first time in a long while I actually feel ahead of the game.

How do you reign in your to-do list?

Are you pursuing your work passion?

According to Nancy Anderson, author of Work With Passion: How to Love What You Do for a Living, there are several secrets to becoming passionate about your job. As my friends at The 36-Hour Day know, in this economy, having a job at all is worth celebrating; having one you truly love may be the Holy Grail of Employment.

A recent poll by Beyond.com of more than 6,800 business executives found that, in this economy, 58 percent said that they'd take any job they could get if they were unemployed right now. About 17 percent said that they'd go back to school, and 6 percent said they'd wait for the economy to get better, but about 18 percent said that they would "pursue their passion."

Which is all well and good, if money is no object. But how do you pursue your passion without falling behind on your mortgage payments?

I think you have to start by figuring out what your passion is. If you're really lucky, you're already doing what you love -- even if it's not for pay, even if it's technically not your "job."

In my case, it's writing. At least, I think it is, right now. I don't have a manuscript tucked away in a drawer or under my bed, though I do have an outlines for a cookbook or two gathering dust on what's left of my desk, and I can't sustain a plot line long enough to write a short story, let alone a novel. That's not the kind of writing I mean. That's the kind of writing real writers do, and I've never thought of myself as a real writer. It's just that I can't not write. I've been that way since I was old enough to hold pencil to paper. I feel better when I can get my thoughts out of my brain and onto the page -- or, for the past decade or so, the screen.

I know that I lose sight of it often. Sometimes, when there's a break in my work-housework-laundry-mom-stepmom-wife-freelance-life juggle, all I want to do is sleep, not contemplate my interests. It's hard to follow your stream of consciousness anywhere when the kids and bills have taken control of the boat.

But if you don't pursue your passion, at least here and there, at least a little bit, what's the point? It's more than "me time" or figuring out what to do with all that leisure time we working moms are supposed to have at our disposal -- it's a matter of doing the thing that makes you tick, the thing that makes you you.

What's your passion? And how to you make time for it?

Been in a car accident? Do these things immediately

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a car accident. I'm fine, the guy who hit me is fine, his car is basically fine, my car is not, but cars are fixable and replaceable and people aren't, so in the grand scheme of things, everything is going to be OK.

The insurance companies are duking things out, and we're looking to see what we can afford (my minivan was totaled). But while I wait for more information about the value of my van (or lack thereof), I thought I'd share a few tips for making sure things go smoothly after an accident. These were posted at The 36-Hour Day last week:

Juggling the workload when your kids are sick

The preschool called before noon on a Tuesday, saying that my 3-year-old son had a fever and needed to be picked up. I was working from home that day -- I had a feeling something like this might happen, since he seemed off but OK and eager to go to school -- and so I made the 5-minute drive to get him, and settled him on the couch for a cuddle and a nap.

Thanks to N1H1, any temperature higher than 100 degrees is considered send-home worthy (the cutoff used to be 101 degrees), and kids who are sent home can't return until they've been symptom-free for 24 hours (which was always the case). My husband and I divvied up the rest of the week -- it took three days before our little guy was able to go back to preschool.

Over at The 36-Hour Day and at Boston.com's Child Caring blog, I'm asking my readers: How do you handle sick days?

We're really lucky. We have paid sick time to tap into (which we almost never use when we're the ones who are sick, of course) and enough seniority to have some flexibility at work. And we also have colleauges who have been there, done that, laundered the germ-infested T-shirt; it's not convenient for them when we have to juggle like this, but they understand because they've had to do it themselves.

Plenty of people have none of that -- no support, no flexibility, and no paid sick time. How are they supposed to cope when this happens to them?

What if your child is the bully, not the victim?

Massachusetts is cracking down on bullying after the January suicide of 15-year-old Pheobe Prince of South Hadley. Last month, an 11-year-old Waltham girl was charged with assault and battery in three bullying incidents at her elementary school, and a trio of Newburyport teens were charged with identity theft in a cyberbullying case.

There's been lots of advice about what parents should do if they find that their child is the victim of a bully, but last month I took a look at another side of the issue in a piece I wrote for The Boston Globe's Living/Arts section: What about when a parent discovers that his or her child is the bully? Here's an excerpt:

It can be easy to dismiss bullying as an inescapable part of childhood and adolescence. Connie Kennedy remembers when her youngest son, Mike, was being bullied two years ago by fellow fourth graders. The Alabama educator and mother of five knew that the physical and verbal abuse could continue as long as the boys attended the small Catholic school together, so she confronted the parents of the three bullies. The parents of two of the boys were horrified by their son’s behavior. The third merely laughed.

“ ‘Oh, you know [he] plays football,’ ’’ Kennedy remembers the mother saying. “ ‘The guys are just playing around. Boys will be boys.’ ’’

Parents are biologically wired to assume that their children are behaving normally, says Dr. Elizabeth Englander, director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center at Bridgewater State College and the mother of three boys. While antisocial behaviors can be a warning sign of abuse or neglect, bullying in general is “not necessarily about abuses in the home, but with parents who are not responding to the fact that their child is showing signs of developing antisocial norms of behavior,’’ Englander says. “They think it’s just a stage, that they’re just being kids.’’ ... [More]

Along with the article, I wrote a sidebar about the red flags that parents can look for and questions kids can ask themselves to determine if they're engaging in bullying behavior. You can read the entire sidebar at Boston.com, but here are the bullet points:

Red flags for parents

1. Look at how kids behave with their siblings. Whereas a normal sibling relationship “is an ambivalent relationship, it runs hot and cold,’’ MARC's Dr. Englander says, ongoing abusiveness of one child toward another is cause for concern.

2. Look at how your child treats his friends. Has he dropped old friends whom he’s played with for years? Does she talk about her old friends in a condescending or derogatory way?

3. Look at how they respond to troubling situations. If they’re watching a movie in which a character is being picked on, does your child respond with empathy, or do they justify the bullying behavior?

4. Tell the child how you would feel if you were the parent of the bully. If you find that they’re responding to a situation unsympathetically - saying “That loser deserved it,’’ for instance - tell them that no one deserves abuse.

Questions for kids to ask themselves

Jennifer Castle, creator and producer of “It’s My Life,’’ a PBSkids.org website for tweens, offers simple questions for kids to ask to determine whether they’re being a bully:

1. Does it make you feel better to hurt other people or take their things?

2. Are you bigger and stronger than other people your age? Do you sometimes use your size and strength to get your way?

3. Have you been bullied by someone in the past and feel like you have to make up for it by doing the same thing to others?

4. Do you avoid thinking about how other people might feel if you say or do hurtful things to them?

And, over at Work It, Mom!, I have a different article on the subject, offering tips for helping your child, whether he or she is the bully or the victim:

Think of the word "bully" and two sterotypes often spring to mind: Big, burly,
meat-headed adolescent boy or pretty, popular, cruel "mean girl." But anyone can
be a bully -- and anyone, even seemingly secure or well-liked girls and boys, can be the victim.

"We're really big on labeling kids," says Peggy Moss, author of anti-bullying children's book Say Something and the mother of 12- and 9-year-old girls. "And it's really important to acknowledge that your child may have been a target yesterday, will be a bystander another day and is going to be a bully one day and we have all played all of those roles. I think we do kids a real disservice by putting them in boxes." ... [More]

I heard many stories from people who were bullied as children, but considerably fewer people -- parents or not -- felt at ease enough to talk about having a child who is a bully, or having been the bully when they were children. Do you have a bullying experience you'd like to talk about? How did you handle yours, and what advice would you give someone else?