Last week, I heard the words all parents are dreading this season: “Your child has swine flu.” The diagnosis came at the climax of an absolutely awful day. I knew something was amiss when my usually talkative daughter was virtually silent during the train ride into Manhattan for her weekly visit to her grandmother’s house. Then she fell asleep during a 10-minute taxi ride. I had a sinking feeling after dropping her off that she was getting sick. And I was right.

At 5:00 that afternoon, I wound up in my pediatrician’s New York office (because I knew I couldn’t make it home to Scarsdale before the Westchester office closed). As luck would have it, this was the first day the office was dispensing the H1N1 vaccine and the waiting room—no...

Four years ago this week, in a conference room in a hotel in Nanchang, China, I became a mother.

After enduring an 18-month paper pregnancy, my husband and I traveled halfway around the world to adopt a baby we knew next to nothing about except that she had been born on February 8, 2005. We learned that bit of information from a note that was left with her when she was found at the doorstep of an orphanage in rural China.

I remember our trip to China like it was yesterday. The day before we met our daughter, we’d just come from Beijing, where we’d been given a whirlwind tour of the major tourist attractions—Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall—all in one afternoon by the Chinese representative from our adoption agency. Our guide...

Although many different sources are doing their best to make us believe the recession is over, anyone who knows anyone who is unemployed or underemployed knows better. I hardly think the ongoing store closings (RIP Smith & Hawken) are a signal that happy days are here again. Things are far from “back to normal” and, if you’re like me, you’ve come to believe we are still in the early stages of adjusting to a “new normal” when it comes to our finances and earning power.

While many of us in Westchester are fortunate enough to live in areas where its’s not as dire as it is in many other parts of the country, I’m going to venture a guess that every one of us has had to reassess where we’ve been spending our money and make the...

At a time when texting and Twitter has made email almost quaint, a new compulsion (addiction?) has emerged from the zeitgeist. The desire among young and old to have instantaneous access to information and the ever increasing commonplace habit to bleat out our own exalted opinion to our “friends,” “fans,” and—even if they don’t want to get them—family, has fostered a whole new genre of worry for parents.

Welcome to the age of Internet Anxiety.

I’m grappling with my own online issues and recently made an interesting discovery. Before we left for summer vacation in August, I found myself compulsively checking all my favorite Internet sites several times an hour. The reasons for this were that things were deadly slow in the...

Why is it that you need a license to drive a car or own a dog but any idiot can be a parent?

This is something that I’ve often thought about over the past four years as I’ve come to understand that nothing you’ve done previously prepares you for the life-changing experience of raising a child. But it’s worth noting that love, common sense, and willingness to put your own needs second to your child’s pretty much will get you through most situations.

That is why I am so sickened by the ongoing freak show of low-life ‘parents” who are using their children to gain C-list fame by scoring their own reality show. The list of these losers gets longer and more sickening every day. “Octomom” was barely out of the delivery room...

When I was a child, my parents were pretty good about taking my brother and me to various special events like the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus, the Ice Capades (my personal favorite), or whatever the big movie of the moment was (I have particularly fond memories of going to see Doctor Doolittle starring Rex Harrison in the grandest theater in our town).

They were fun family outings for all. I never remember either one of my parents recounting the experiences as fraught with peril. We wanted to go, my parents got the tickets, and we went. End of story.

I was reminded of this simpler time when, this past weekend, my husband and I tried to get tickets to the live show of Yo Gabba Gabba, one of my daughter’s favorite programs on Noggin (now Nick Jr.)...

With all the stomach-turning news events that sickened me last week as the mother of a young child—Polanski and his apologists, Letterman’s sex with interns and the won’t-go-away Gosselins—there was one slightly under-the-radar tale of parenting gone wrong that stayed with me ever since I happened upon the story online.

Last week, parenting blogger Anita Tedaldi went on the Today show to explain her decision to give up a child she adopted 18 months ago. This mother of five biological children explained she “wasn’t connecting with (the adopted baby) on the visceral level I experienced with my biological daughters.”

Huh?

Go ahead, call me judgmental but, as the mother of an adopted child, I am horrified by this.

After...

Even though the kids have been in school for weeks, it’s finally beginning to feel like it’s truly “back to school” season. Maybe that’s because the kids are, finally, really back to school. Most importantly to “working parents” (is there any other kind?), classes are finally in session for full days. We’re in the clear until Columbus Day – whew!

As October begins, I realize that my hope that “things would get easier” as my daughter gets older, couldn’t be more off base. Now that she is four, every weekday I spend nearly 90 minutes in total each day driving my daughter back and forth to her preschool. When I listened to the other moms who congregated in the café at the school while we all waited...

Most parents I know are pretty vigilant about what they let their children watch on television. In my house, Noggin is the network of choice for my four-year-old—and she rarely watches it alone. We’re very careful not to expose her developing mind to glimpses of Mommy and Daddy’s shows in the event she might see or hear something she shouldn’t.

Up until last week, we didn’t have to worry if she happened to walk in on the middle of a tennis match or a few minutes of a newscast.

Thanks, Serena Williams, Roger Federer and—I can’t believe I’m writing this—Ernie Anastos —for showing my daughter how not to behave. Don’t even get me started on Kayne West.

You should all be ashamed of...

Now that kids are back to school (and those dreadfully inconvenient abbreviated days have come to close), the majority of moms I know are still in a period of adjustment. While kids’ and (most) dads’ lives have gone back to normal, mothers are faced with a host of changes that usually take most of the year to get used to.

Whether a woman is a “stay-at-home mom” (a term I find ridiculous because, as most moms will tell you, if you’re parenting 24/7 you’re rarely at home) or a working mom (another misnomer since everyone with kids ‘works’), each school year brings its own set of unique challenges that, once conquered, are replaced by new ones.

While I was waiting for my daughter’s one-hour first day of preschool class to...