It's the time of year when, walking along wooded trails in New England you can often spot the bright orange of the Red Spotted Newt or Red Eft. Kids call them salamanders (you can learn the difference between the two here) and the whimsical book The Salamander Room definitely captures the wonder and affection many kids feel towards these small creatures.

In the story a little boy named Brian carries home a small red salamander. He makes it a bed of leaves in his room with crickets and bullfrogs to sing it to sleep... and with each turn of the page his room becomes more and more magical as it is transformed into a forest habitat as the boy imagines how he will care for his small new pet.

It's the kind of story I remember imagining as a kid, lying in bed when I couldn't fall asleep: what if the ceiling were removed so that I could see the sky? What if I could sleep among the trees? Written by Anne Mazer, this gentle story is a lovely bedtime book. It's also a great story to read if your child happens to find a newt and wants to bring it home. Which my three year old son happened to do just yesterday.

Clutching it carefully in his palm, eyes wide, Bean begged to be allowed to keep the little Red Spotted newt as a pet. After some quick research, I found that these critters are actually easy pets to keep for a while. If he's going to have a pet, this one seems almost ideal. Better, at least than the earth worms he's always trying to put in his pockets. Although hand washing is a must. Here's why.

It's my opinion that three year olds aren't really able to keep any any kind of pet that requires actual, but the newt only requires a few small earth worms every so often, and a little terrarium to live in. So after a quick trip to the pet store, and a scamper through the woods to gather moss and bark for the newt's new habitat, Bean spent almost an hour tonight narrating a wonderfully elaborate story about what his new friend Leafy was doing in it's little home. (Other names he contemplated: Violet, Speckles, Louie and Spot.)

Does your child have a favorite nature book or a pet from the woods?

Jenifer Garner's recent response to this question made me smile because it's pretty much exactly what I manage to mutter whenever someone asks.

"Sometime. I don't know. I have to think about that one."

Garner's lovely daughter Violet is 2, and two seems to be the magical age that makes everyone in the universe--both random strangers and dear friends--feel the need to inquire about future procreating plans.

When my son turned 2 the whole "when are you having a second?" became something I was asked on a nearly weekly basis. He is now 3 and the concern from random strangers, or the raised eyebrows from friends who've gone and had a second kid, seems to grow more urgent with every passing month.

"But don't you want your kids to be close in age so they can be friends?"

"You won't want to start all over again with diapers once you're out of them! It's better to do it all at once!"

Etc. And basically, it feels like behind every questions is an accusation: You're a wimp. Suck it up and have a second kid right now because that's what everybody does.

Garner is a delightfully refreshing down-to-earth celeb mama. She seems to truly enjoy motherhood, and she seems like she actually is a hands-on mother, which is more than many Hollywood mamas can boast. Which makes her hesitant answer all the more authentic.

Parenting is damn hard, sometimes. Especially when the kid is under 3. Sleep deprivation made me feel insane for brief episodes of time. And it's only just now, that I'm starting to feel like my life is no longer defined by motherhood, and my son is still crawling into my bed in the middle of the night when he wakes up. Which isn't to say I don't love motherhood, because I do. I've loved every single stage my son has gone through. And I think that we will have a second one. Sometime. Maybe.

It meantime, it seems like Garner and I both need to master the fine art of the sarcastic come back. Got any?

As parents and teachers it is easy in this day and age to feel entirely compelled to answer every 'good' question a child asks. We are all the products of the information age swelling up around us. I can hardly remember turning to the row of leather bouned Encyclopedia Britanica's on my dad's office bookshelf for research projects. Did I ever really do that? Now Google is all I'll ever need. And because information is so readily available, and we're all pretend experts on any one of a dozen topics, when a kid asks a question--we try for an answer.

But there is something remarkable about letting the big questions that kids ask just sit for a little while, unanswered. Wonder fills kids with all kinds of brilliant ideas. Whey they look for their own answers, the world grows large with meaning before them.

Anyone who spends any amount of time around kids knows how frequently they ask questions. (Every ten seconds.) And their constant inquisitiveness sometimes becomes a burden or an annoyance as you feel compelled to find the answers. Why are the leaves green? Why do trees have leaves? Why are there trees? Because of this thing called cholorophyl...because they need them to grow... becausw we need air...because. It's not uncommon when answering the questions children ask to feel like you have slipped into the twilight zone of the metaphysical.

But occasionally instead of answering, ask back. Really. Ask a child to answer one of their own questions. I tried this recently with a group of six and seven year olds who are studying matter.

"What is matter? " They wanted to know, when I told them we;'d be studying it for the next several weeks.

"What do you think it is? I asked back.

One little girl replied, "Matter is maybe something invented by someone named Matt."

The next day we continued the conversation with the touching off point that matter is 'anything you can touch or feel.' With that definition, brought to the group by a classmember, the children were off.

"We can feel air, is air matter?"

"We can feel our hearts beating, are our hearts matter?"

"If it's anything we can touch or feel, it's EVERYTHING around us."

"If matter is everything, is God matter?"

"If matter is everything, is anything NOT matter?"

I don't even begin to answer their questions. Huge, brilliant, awe inspring questions, filled with the sweet wonder of small children.

Instead I grin widly and write them on chart paper for us to think about over our unit of study. Some questions we'll find answers to. Other's we might not. Answering the question isn't as important as asking it.

"Mommy, Mike Mulligan smokes a pipe," my three year old son told me the other day while we were digging in the garden.

I knew right away what he was talking about: we'd been out for pizza the night before, and on the way to the car he was gleefully jumping off picnic table benches when we encountered not one, but many cigarette butts.

Of course he wanted to know what they were, and I explained that some people smoke them even though it's really bad for them, and it makes it unhealthy for their lungs. And they often don't clean up after themselves and leave part of the cigarette behind.He nodded earnestly, and that was, I thought, the last of it ...until he brought it up in the garden the next day.

"You're right, Mike Mulligan does smoke a pipe" I said, hoping we could just leave it at that.

"Is he a-posed to though mommy?" he asked me, earnestly, scanning my face for the way I would respond.

"Well, no. It will make his lungs hurt," I replied.

"But then why does he do it?"

Oy. How on earth do you answer that? Mike Mulligan drives a STEAM SHOVEL for crying out loud. He is what every little digger-obsessed boy wants to be.

Granted, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is old school. A classic. Outdated, maybe, but it's a favorite around our house.

And there are so other classic kid's books that endorse bad behaviors: Ella the Elephant which is a delightful tale about overcoming selfishness and learning to help others, exept for the fact that a mean old farmer tries to shoot Ella in the rump. In fact, many Bill Peet books feature both guns and pipes.

It's even more of a slippery slope once one begins to delve into the realm of 'chapter books'. Pipi Longstocking who wields guns, drinks coffee, curses, and generally runs amok, while also setting a fierce and delightful example for girls to be anything they wish to be. And The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, well, the book was, and still is, banned from various schools by various groups of concerned individuals.

So. What should you do as a parent with these books from from an era gone by, that are at onece (arguably) a bad influence, AND great stories of character, plot, and sheer delight? Do you skip them, or read them and attempt to give your kiddo a literary and social context with which to interpret them?

Spain's newly appointed defense minister made international news this week as she reviewed troops in Madrid and was sworn in. Not only is Carme Chacón, 37, the first woman to head Spain's armed forces, she is also seven months pregnant.

The sight of Chacón inspecting troops on her first day in office, a delicate maternity blouse billowing over her belly, blond hair was blowing in the breeze, came as a shock. Her appointment however, came as no surprise: Spain's prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who was reelected for a second term last month, has consistently demonstrated his commitment to gender equality, and has appointed more women than men to his cabinet.

Spanish feminists say that the fact that people were shocked to see a pregnant woman heading up Spain's troops is is exactly the point. "It's an important image precisely because it conveys normality," says Marisa Sotelo, president of the Madrid' based Women's Foundation. "It serves a pedagogic function: it shows that women can be and are everywhere."

Working mom's arguably have the hardest jobs in the world, no matter what they do: they are expected in many ways to be superwoman, pouring 100% of their energy into their jobs, and then another 100% into their kids. One can only imagine the standard to which Chacón will be held to by her colleagues, and the general public.

Without a doubt Chacón will be expected to demonstrate that she is capable of the position, and already her first challenge is looming: will she take the 4 months of maternity leave she is entitled to? And perhaps more pressingly, can she afford to do so? By comparison, men are only given slightly more than 2 weeks paternity leave.

Can you imagine opening the glossy pages of a high fashion magazine and NOT seeing stick thin models? This is may be made reality in France.

The French parliament's lower house has recently adopted a landmark bill that would make it illegal for anyone to promote or "publicly incite" extreme thinness. Remarkably, this legislation won unanimous support from the ruling conservative UMP party and was approved in a series of votes by the National Assembly. It goes to the Senate in the next few weeks, and if passed, it would affect affect the way fashion magazines, Web sites, advertisers and other media portray thinness.

French couture are of course opposed to the idea of legal boundaries on beauty standards--but just think how a ban on the portrayal of extreme thinness might positively affect the way women and young girls see themselves.

Of course, it seems like fashion models have almost been replaced in the U.S. by the Hollywood elite. It is more likely for an actress to grace the covers of Vogue or Elle than for a model. And I imagine were a similar ban to be put in place here, the American appetite for Hollywood gossip would blur the lines between promoting thinness and portraying a lifestyle that places an extremely high value on thinness.

But I'll be watching the outcome of this with interest. In my small high school, probably one in three girls (or more) had an eating disorder of some sort, and two were memorably hospitalized. Now I teach first graders and I am constantly listening to little girls talk about their weight. "I'm thin," they say proudly, as if they were declaring that thin equals smart or creative or talented. And it kind of makes my heart ache.

"I knew it was illegal, of course I knew it was illegal but you know, so what," John Deaves, 69, said of the relationship he has with his daughter, Jenny, 39.

The pair apparently reunited 31 years after Mr. Deaves separated from Jenny's mother, and felt attraction towards one another. Mrs Deaves said that "soon after reuniting with her father she began to see him as a man first and her father second. "

The pair have conceived two children together.

The first child died of a heart condition, but the second baby, Celeste, is a 9 month old girl who appears healthy and lives with her parents in Australia. Mrs Deaves also brought two children, Samantha and Alex, into the relationship after splitting from her former partner.

The couple, who went public with their relationship, say "We are just asking for a little bit of respect and understanding."

While I can only wish the best for their child, I cannot even begin to imagine the stigma she (or her half siblings) will grow up with, living with her parents.

A South Australian police media spokesman said "the couple is being monitored".

The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby who wrote a critical piece about the 'pregnant man' recently interviewed on Oprah, sees this couple's story as just as another example of how aberrant sexual behavior is becoming increasingly tolerated within society. And in both cases, the child involved will likely grow up under constant public scrutiny.

What do you think? Should the Deaves be granted "respect and understanding" for their decision to have children, or is their relationship (in addition to being illegal) taking things way too far?

Nancy Carlsson-Paige wants to open up dialog about how violence in the media affects healthy child development, even while her son, Matt Damon, has starred in some of the most violent movies the media has produced in the past few years.

Carlsson-Paige teaches early education at Lesley University, and is the author of the newly released book "Taking Back Childhood: Helping Your Kids Thrive in a Fast-Paced, Media-Saturated, Violence-Filled World." She began to look at the way violence was changing childhood in the mid 1980's when teachers began reporting that the boys in their classrooms were acting "more aggressively."

The mother of two sons, Carlsson-Paige and colleague Diane Levin surveyed teachers in 19 states and found that the phenomenon was nation wide. The cause? "The Federal government had lifted limits to allow marketing to children on television."

Carlsson-Paige has earned national acclaim for her groundbreaking research on media violence and its impact on children, says that she wishes her son didn't make such violent movies.

"In my perfect world, our artists would show us a way out of the violence we are immersed in instead of perpetuating it. But what I wish for even more is that society didn't crave violence so much, because it perpetuates a cycle of violence that only produces an appetite for more and more of it. What I focus on is that we have to find ways to protect children from exposure," she says.

In response, Matt Damon says that he keeps his mother's views in mind as he films. " I accept and agree with what she says - that it desensitizes kids, that there could be blowback from it." And to back his words with action, Damon has lobbied to prevent his likeness from being licensed for any "Bourne" toys or video games.

The issue of childhood violence became a particularly personal one for Carlsson-Paige in 1990 when her older son Kyle's childhood best friend Jesse McKie was stabbed to death on a Cambridge street by five teenage boys who wanted his leather jacket.

"How did those young men who killed Jesse come to do that? How were they capable of doing that?" she asks.

And while many have suggested that the real cause for increasingly aggressive and violent behavior among children was primarily a factor of socioeconomic inequity, Carlsson-Paige wanted to look deeper.

"Today's average child spends four to four and a half hours [a day] in front of a screen," she says. "That's time not spent interacting with other children or parents; time not spent at play, thinking about what you want to do and creating ways to do it; time not spent gaining the experience of taking another person's view point and working out conflicts peaceably. These are losses for children. They are dramatic changes in childhood. They concern me very much."

Video games, computer games, cartoons, movies, and T.V. shows with explicit violent content are regularly being marketed to children. Carlsson-Paige's research has found that they have a direct impact on the way children behave.

I see this behavior in my classroom every day: in the way children play, draw, and respond to frustrating situations. Aggression is not just 'boys being boys' and it is not just a problem the poor have to deal with. It is pervasive in every level of society, and parents should be doing something more about it. Carlsson-Paige's book is a good place to start.

There is something breathtaking about this story, and not just because it's about a baby born with two faces. What fills me with wonder is how this child is being received--by her parents and her community.

Born in India, where the people have a rich religious tradition and believe strongly in reincarnation, the two-faced baby girl, Lali, who was born with an extremely rare condition called craniofacial duplication, is being heralded as the reincarnate of a Hindu goddess Durga, and worshiped.

What a gift this response is for this child. What a gift that this small person will grow up in a culture where she is valued for her uniqueness--for her remarkable two sets of eyes, noses, and mouths. I cannot help but imagine that were she to have been born a poor farmer in this country, rather than in India, her life would have been viewed as profoundly tragic, rather than as the blessing her parents see her as.

In Western culture 'normal' is valued very highly, and parents are continually worrying about whether their children conform to what is typical. Almost invariably, were Lali to have been born here, her parents would have immediately sought out any and all available corrective surgeries to make her as close to 'normal' as possible, which in the end would still be quiet far away from that standard, and would likely send only one message to the child: you are not okay just as you are.

But her parents have opted instead to let her grow up the way she is. "My daughter is fine -- like any other child," her father, Vinod Singh, said. She opens and closes all four eyes at the same time, and is able to drink milk using either mouth.

"Lali is God's gift to us," said Jaipal Singh, a member of the local village council. "She has brought fame to our village." And the village chief, Daulat Ram said he planned to build a temple to goddess Durga, the fiery goddess of valor, who is traditionally depicted as having three eyes and many arms.

Lali's condition is often linked to other serious health complications, but the child's doctor, Sabir Ali, director of Saifi Hospital, said that "She is leading a normal life with no breathing difficulties. Ali added that he saw no need for surgery.

Nalgene water bottles have long been a trusty earth friendly alternative to using disposable water bottles. These virtually indestructible bottles are made of hard plastic, come in varying sizes and colors, and have long been trendy sports accessory .

Yet recently, amid concern about a hormone-mimicking chemical used in Nalgenes several retailers (including Patagonia and the Canadian Mountain Equipment Co-op) to remove Nalgene and other polycarbonate plastic containers from store shelves.

Ben Dobbin of the Boston Globe reports that "There is little dispute that the chemical can disrupt the hormonal system, but scientists differ markedly on whether very low doses found in food and beverage containers can be harmful. The US Food and Drug Administration sides with the plastics industry that BPA-based products do not pose a health risk."

A panel of researchers at a US government conference reported that the potential for BPA to affect human health is a concern, and more research is needed. The panel also noted evidence that Americans have higher levels of BPA than those found to cause harm in lab animals. Yikes.

Like all the warnings about lead in children's products that have cropped up this past year, including a recent recall of metal water bottles, it's hard for consumers--especially parent consumers who must make responsible decisions on behalf of their kids--to know what to worry about and what not to.

Many outdoor enthusiasts who have used Nalgenes for years seem unconcerned about the possible BPA hormone disruption that the Nalgene bottles may cause. Other plastic bottles may also pose the same threat. Here's how to tell if your child's watter bottle is safe.

I'm veering on the side of caution with this one. Just as hormone free milk seems like a good idea, I'm thinking that this is just one more reason to love Sigg's awesome water bottles for kids.