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Fast food is so easy!  All you do is drive through, take it home and put it on the tables. Unfortunately, fast food is bad for your health - and more importantly, for your kids’ health.

Fast food restaurants keep adding so called ‘healthy items’ to their menus, but most people won’t order the apple slices instead of the fries, or the juice box instead of the soda.  If you let your kids eat too much fast food, they won’t even want to eat these healthy foods at home.

The danger of fast food isn’t just spoiling your children’s taste buds. The sugar and fat in fast food can be dangerous to your child’s health. There is a dangerous trend in this country towards childhood obesity. The foods you put in front of your child make a difference.

Trans fat is slowly being eliminated from restaurants due to repeated warnings, but saturated fat is still widely used and can cause severe health problems as well. If you eat out a lot, start asking to see the nutritional information and notice how much fat the foods contain and what kind.

Often one meal at a fast food restaurant will have nearly enough calories to meet the day’s total requirements, and will have even more sodium, fat and sugar content than most people should eat. For kids, this can be very bad indeed.

Children who are still growing need a balanced diet to help their bones and muscles develop properly. Fast food fills the stomach and makes them sluggish, so they don’t want to exercise. It also makes them less likely to want to eat other foods - fast food can become almost addictive for the blood sugar rush that accompanies eating it.

Obesity in children, if caught early is easier to reverse if a firm rule of no fast food is made and followed. You may have to be creative to find foods that will make them happy, but after a while they will grow accustomed to the naturally sweet taste of an apple, and be able to enjoy regular food again.

Once in a while junk food won’t hurt you, but it’s not a good habit to make. Consider saving fast food for very special occasions, and finding other ways to make food that tastes good and goes on the table quick!

You find a lot of stuff on mom blogs about personal stuff! We feel like sharing, and sometimes we admit things because we think our experiences will help others. Well, I have a confession!

I bite my nails. It’s a nervous habit. I have gotten a lot better; now I mainly do it when I am reading a very suspenseful book, or watching a scary movie. I don’t usually notice I am doing it until the tips of my fingers start to hurt! Then I ma mad at myself for biting them down so far, and I put nail polish al over my nails so I won’t put my fingers in my mouth.

What is bad now, is my daughter is biting her nails! I think she learned it from me. I am very upset about it - how do I get her to stop?

Fortunately she has mostly stopped and seems like she only bites them in the car on long drives. I got her a little electronic game to play in the car that uses both hands, and now she is too busy playing to even think about her nails!

I decided to look up nail biting on the internet, and see if I could find some advice. There were a lot of options, like putting socks on her hands, or dipping her fingers in hot sauce. Neither of those seemed like a good idea to me.

I decided to check the mom blogs, and found a great tip right away, on an old blog from a year and a half ago. I tried it with my daughter and it worked!  I just told her when she stopped biting her nails, I would take her to the nail salon and she could have her nails painted professionally.

She stopped biting her nails right away, and a month later they were long and beautiful! She had them painted right before picture day, and was so proud. That was a great tip!

I still haven’t stopped biting mine. I don’t care about polish, so I guess I have to think of a different prize for me!

My favorite book for my kids is :Just Go To Bed!” by Mercer Meyer. This book is so funny - The daddy bunny keeps telling the baby bunny to go to bed, but the baby bunny has to be a race car driver, an astronaut, a cowboy and several other characters until he finally makes it to bed. If you have kids, you have been there; the one excuse after another after another…

This is the same guy who wrote the adorable “A Boy and a Frog” picture books, and features the same character as the famous “Just For You”. I think one reason I love this book so much is because it was the first book my daughter ever read herself. Now, listen up, this is one of the best parenting tips I’ve got!

I took long sentence strips (you can get them at the craft store in school supplies) and wrote out each sentence from the book - then made up sentences using the same words. I did this because she had learned the book by heart in order, so I mixed up the sentences to see if she could recognize the words without the pictures to help. It took a few days, but she did it!  She was only four.

Now my daughter is nine, and she is just like me. She always has a book in her hand, and would rather read than watch TV. I am so glad she likes to read - I have a lot of friends that all say their kids hate reading. I think that is so sad! When I was growing up, we didn’t have TV in our house, so I learned to read when I was three and I couldn’t even tell you how many tens of thousands of books I have read in my life!

Read to your kid today! You’ll be glad you did - and go get a copy of “Just Go To Bed” and “Just For You”!!

One of the best tips for parenting I ever got was from my grandma. She told me you could get a kid to eat almost anything if you promised them a piece of pie afterwards! Then she taught me how to make pie…

Cherry Harvest Pie

1 can sweet cherry pie filling
1 jar ready to use mincemeat filling
1 Granny Smith apple
2 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp soft butter

9 inch deep double crust for pie

Make your own pie crust dough out of 2 cups flour, ½ teaspoon salt, 1/3 cup shortening cut into the flour to pea size, and 6-8 Tablespoons iced water sprinkled in until it forms a mass. Roll-out and shape the bottom pie crust, fluting the edges. Prick the bottom with a fork, and bake at 425 for five minutes. Allow to cool.

Spread mincemeat evenly across bottom of pie shell, cover with cherry pie filling, poking each cherry with a fork or toothpick to check for pits. Top with thinly sliced apples arranged in a single layer to form a starburst pattern. Sprinkle sugar over top, and dot with butter.

Roll out top pie crust and cut a circle an inch wider all around than pie. Cut out six small leaf shapes to allow for venting. Use a toothpick to score veins on the cutouts. Place the top crust over the pie, fluting to match the bottom crust. Use a little egg whit to brush the backs of the leaf cutouts, and arrange them on the solid parts of the top crust. Make a foil ring to protect the crust edge, and bake pie at 325 for 30-40 minutes until bubbly and apples are cooked (Check with toothpick through vent).

Another great trick moms can use is to hide extra veggies in pumpkin pie. Cut up a freshly washed zucchini and steam it until soft. Throw in the blender with your ready made pie filling and ¼ cup of sugar, or simply puree and substitute for an equal amount of pumpkin in a ‘from scratch’ pie. Add a shake of nutmeg to provide extra specks, and serve with a dollop of whipped cream. Your kids won’t even notice!

Many pies are fruit or vegetable based, and a little sugar isn’t going to hurt your kids if they are getting proper nutrition! We eat a lot of pie for dessert at our house; I think it is a much better choice than cake or cookies. The sugar content and fat content is less per serving, and we get some good stuff out of them too! They still satisfy our sweet tooth, and we can add a scoop of ice cream or whipped topping for an added treat.

Ask your friends and other parents for their ways of getting their kids to eat healthy, even at the holidays! Parents blogs always have lots of good ideas, so keep your eyes open - we will be doing more recipes this month and next month, too!

Last week I was a volunteering as a chaperone for my daughter’s class field trip. It was the trip to the local Space & Science Observatory Center, and honestly, I didn’t expect to enjoy it (don’t tell my daughter!). I was thinking that a space exhibitions wouldn’t be very interesting for an adult, and that I was only going because I am helping with a lot of small things in Kristina’s school this year - I was so wrong!

It was amazing! First we saw 3D movie about stars. It was presented in a very comprehensive way so the children could relate and understand. The story was about two kids who built a rocket from an old refrigerator box, and their imaginative journey into the solar system. After the show, the children enjoyed seeing the exhibition with the real space ships and telescopes.

My favorite activities ones that allowed the children to do different learning projects about the space, microbes and space station life. They had a chance to learn about the NASA space station, and why Japan, Canada, Russia and many other countries joined the project. They watched another movie about life aboard the space station and how the cosmonauts exercise and keep their muscles strong.

It was very informative and fun trip! This is a great place for children and parent to go and learn. I hope you can use this parenting tip for your rainy day or clear night weekends. There are so many things to learn in the observatory centers! It might be not only a one time visit - I know we are definitely going to come back during the night to see the stars in the telescope!

If you are a expectant or new mom, trying to decide whether or not to breastfeed can be very difficult! If you have to work outside the home, trying to breastfeed your baby can seem almost impossible. This is where a mom support group can be invaluable!

You are not alone. Moms across the country are trying to make these tough decisions too, and sometimes just having another person to talk to can help! When moms connect over issues like breastfeeding, the knowledge and encouragement get shared around and you can find support no matter which decision you end up making.

I breastfed all three of my children. I consider myself lucky because I was able to without a lot of hardship. With my first, I worked outside the home for the first few months, ten hours a day. However, the job was five minutes away from my house, and my husband was a stay at home dad. My schedule ran in three short shifts, 9-12, 1-4 and 5-9, which meant every three or four hours I could come home for an hour and nurse my daughter.

She was an easy baby, too, and slept through the night from the age of two weeks, so even when I switched jobs and worked nights I was able to feed her before I left and put her to bed. I would get home right before she woke in the morning! By the time she was a year old, I had found a job that let me work from home, and from then on I was a work at home, stay at home mom. My boys were able to breast feed too!

I have a lot of friends for whom it wasn’t so easy. They had to work long days away from the home, and some were single moms or moms with hubbies who worked, so the baby went into daycare as soon as their maternity leave ended. One or two tried to pump breast milk and send it for their babies, but most just decided to switch to formula. A couple used formula from the start so they wouldn’t have to do a switchover.

I always tried to offer all of these moms support, because I don’t know what I would have done in their place!  I knew I was lucky to have an easy decision. I always felt that breastfeeding was a natural way to make my babies healthy and strong, and they weren’t sick very often. Even today, my older ones only have ever had one ear infection each, and my 18 month old (who is just about weaned) has never had even one. Of course, that might be due to not being in daycare, too; I notice the first year they are in school they spend a lot of time being sick as they get used to all the germs!

The only other thing that I notice about formula is that nearly all the moms I know that use it have babies that colic all the time. I don’t know for sure if it is connected, but it seems to be that they always have to keep switching the formula all the time looking for one that doesn’t upset their babies’ stomachs. None of mine ever were colicky, and I know I am very lucky!

The best thing for any mom is just to do whatever works best for her and her baby. I believe in breastfeeding, but I realize that not everyone can or wants to breastfeed, and I respect their decision!

Whether you decide to breast feed or go the formula route, it’s important that you have people around you that support your decision. You are the mom, and you have to ultimately decide what works best for you AND your baby!

Yesterday, my eight year old daughter had a friend over for a play date. I was watching the news in the kitchen and girls were having lunch. I had witnessed a \very interesting conversation between my daughter and her friend.

My daughter: “Did you watch the president election on CNN?”

Her Friend: “Of course! You know the president’s daughters are going to have a new puppy!”

My daughter: “Yes, It is so cool! Did you also see another old guy speaking?”

Her Friend: “What guy?”

My daughter: “Another guy, who looks like a Santa Claus. He also wanted to be a president but didn’t win.”

Her Friend: “Oh! Yes, I remember him. He is with Sarah Palin. Last night I had a nightmare about her.”

Me: “What??? You had a nightmare about Sarah Palin???”

Her Friend: “Yes, in my dream she was a vampire. She wanted my blood!”

My daughter: “Oh! Gosh! This is scary!”

It is scary that these days even eight year olds are getting political.

Sometimes having a husband is like having an extra kid. Forget about responsibility and consideration. Boys will be boys, even when they get big! The funny thing is that they think they can slip this stuff by you and you won’t even notice. Millions of women on mom blogs across the country can’t be wrong! Multiple duplications of each item in this list make it impossible to attribute credit - these things are universal. So, here are the top ten annoying things about husbands…

1. If asked to do laundry, they will deliberately choose to do whites, and slip a red garment into the load. Voila: pink socks. You never ask them to do the laundry again. (They also are completely incapable of putting any laundry into the appropriate hamper, for some reason preferring the floor directly next to the hamper.)

2. If asked to let you sleep in, they will make as much noise as possible making the children as unhealthy a breakfast as they possibly can. Upon your appearing bleary-eyed in the kitchen to survey the scene in dismay, they will look aggrieved at your unappreciation of their efforts. You never ask to sleep in again.

3. If you hand them a ‘honey-do’ list they will pick the one that is the least important but most time consuming: while the lawn is unmowed and the car unwashed, they will meticulously spend an entire day at the Home Depot looking for just the right screw to hang a picture in the living room.

4. When at Home Depot they will invariable meet someone whom they must invite back to the house for beer and a grill out.

5. Which entails you going to the store to buy beer, meat, charcoal and paper plates. (Because it would be rude for them to leave their company.)

5. Grilling out is equated to them making dinner, even though you prepare the meat, bring them a beer, cook the veggies, keep them supplied with beer while they stand around the grill, remind them the meat is burning, serve the meal, make another beer run, and clean up afterwards while they relax with a beer. They will expect to be thanked profusely for making dinner and giving you a night off.

6. They maintain that Spike TV is primetime’s answer to Lifetime, Oxygen and HSN, that men have needed their own channel for millennia. For some unknown reason, two hundred and thirty seven hunting, fishing, automotive, golfing, racing, football, baseball, basketball, hockey and wrestling channels do not count as ‘man’ channels.

7. When watching TV they must continually change the channel to ensure they are not missing anything important; then they complain that nothing is ever on. However, they can watch seventeen consecutive hours of COPS without a bathroom break.

8. Girls on trampolines are admired for their brains and athletic ability. So are the women who hold up the numbers at fight matches. So are the waitresses at Hooters. Hey, those trays aren’t easy to carry!

9. The ideal day to get married is your birthday. This is presented as a romantic idea, but really ensures that they only have one day to remember. They invariably forget, anyway.

10. The final annoying thing men do is the most simple. They leave the seat up. There is nothing you can do about this; it is hard wired into DNA and is impossible to defeat.

Why do we love these overgrown children? The mom blogs have only one answer - because just when we think we can’t take it any more, they do something so sweet, so unexpected and so thoughtful that our hardened heart melts and we have to forgive them. To the hubbies out there - we salute you. We wouldn’t put up with this kind of behavior from anybody else. And if you leave the seat up one more time, I’ll –