Since we are a bunch of geeks in this house, we had our tickets for the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire lined up well in advance. I bought four tix, intending to go with my husband (Jay Allen, whom you know from these pages), my oldest daughter, Meg, who is 20, and my second oldest, Neve, who at 8 1/2 is a HUGE Harry Potter fan.

We did have some misgivings about the PG-13 rating, but we know what Neve can handle pretty well so felt comfortable bringing her. Jax, who is six, and Veda, who is four, wanted to go as well, but we vetoed that until I could see the film and judge the scary factor for myself. I was actually surprised at how many people came out to the opening night with sleepy little ones in tow.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wants to keep religion and ideology out of your kids' sex education classes. The ACLU announced on Wednesday the launch of a nationwide call-to-action, Not in My State. ACLU affiliates in 18 states are sending letters to local officials asking that federally-funded sex education curricula with abstinence-only curricula be pulled from classrooms. Officials are being asked to select only materials that teach medically-accurate information unbiased by religious views or ideologies.

Down in Australia, the National Association for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (NAPCAN) blames social isolation, along with other factors including poverty, inadequate services and substance abuse, for the increase in child abuse rates, which have doubled there over the past five years.  NAPCANs state president, Pat Jewell, also blamed the increase in working parents on the disintegration of community.

I can see NAPCANs point - after all, these are no longer the days when you can trust the village to help keep your child safe. When my mom was growing up, all the women in the neighborhood kept an eye out, and you couldn't spit on the sidewalk without your mother hearing about it two minutes later. These days, in many communities, people don't even know their neighbors. But is that a result of "working parents", or something else? People have always worked, even back when we all lived in villages. So what is it about today's society that's so much more isolating?

A teenage mom from Louisiana who was evacuated to San Diego will be reunited with her one-year-old son, who had been taken to Arkansas with his grandmother before Hurricane Katrina hit.

I can't even imagine how hard it's been for this young mother to be away from her baby while also dealing with the trauma of surviving one of the worst national disasters in our history. Thankfully, Brandy Johnson had the good sense to send her baby out of Louisiana as a precaution, or this might have been a tragic tale instead of a story of a happy reunion.

When I took Neve to see Bad News Bears the other day, there was a huge display at the theater advertising the Firefly Mobile Phone for kids (pictured, right). My gut reaction was a cacophony of mixed emotions.

Remember that scene from Animal House when the guy had the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, arguing back and forth? Picture that, but with animated cell phones - one white with angel wings and halo, one red with little devil horns and pitchfork. I'll leave it to you to determine which was which: 

A couple of days ago, I posted a news item about a woman who sold her baby. I made an aside at the end of the post, that was intended not as a flippant remark about legal adoption, but as a "discussion starter". We do that a lot around here - at Blogging Baby we aren't trying to just be a news clipping service, but to provide you with interesting, original content, and to engage you, our readers in discussion.

Some readers were offended by that remark, and lambasted me in the comments for it. I reacted defensively, and posted an economic analogy in the comments that really set things on fire. I was trying to raise a point about another user's comments, and compared the exchange of money for value in an adoption to the exchange of money for value in any other economic transaction.

Boy oh boy, did I open a can of worms with my post the other day about the mom who sold her baby for $5,000.  I already said this in the comments, but I'll preface this post with it too: I am sorry if some members of the adoption community were offended by the economic analogy I used (and I wasn't comparing babies to hunks of beef, by the way - I'm a parent of five, folks - I was comparing the economic model of adoption to the economic model of trading money for any other thing of value).

However, the mere fact that some people disagree with me does not mean they are right and I am wrong, or that I am right and they are wrong - just that we have different points of view on a subject about which we feel passionately. And that's okay, folks. Difference of opinion is a good thing, we don't all have to think alike, and as a writer, I am not going to soft-pitch everything I write to avoid all possibility of offending any person who might read it. 

Every summer, there are news stories about babies accidentally left in cars, who die before someone remembers the baby was there. The most recent story, out of Florida, is yet another tragic tale of a parent who just forgot the baby was in the car. Five-month-old Kayli Saavedra died Thursday. Her father arrived to pick her up from daycare after work, only to be told she had never been dropped off. He rushed out to the car and found his daughter, still strapped in carseat, dead after being left in the hot car all day.

I cannot imagine anything more tragic than knowing your child died because of something so preventable. I cannot judge this father - by all accounts this was nothing more than a horrible, tragic, mistake - one that could happen to any of us, as we bustle through our hectic lives, minds always busy and "multitasking". There was another case similar to this in 2003, when Mark Warschauer accidentally left his 10-month-old son in the car all morning. Warschauer has a website dedicated to his son, in the hopes that other parents will learn from his tale and prevent tragedies like this from happening.

I believe that teaching kids about money is as important to their adult life as teaching them about how to tie their own shoes, or how to communicate respectfully with other people.  If you read Money Magazine or lots of finanicial books, they'll tell you to start by giving kids an allowance and teaching them how to save part of it and spend part. As our younger four kids are getting older, this is a topic more and more on our minds.

One website devoted to helping you teach your kids about money is Moonjar. In addition to advice about teaching kids about money, you can purchase moneyboxes (pictured above) divided into three sections: spend, save and share.  The idea is to help your child create a budget, and to help him decide how to divide his allowance among the three boxes. Kiplingers has a section of great articles on kids and money.

So tell us, dear readers: what do you do in your house to help your kids learn to be smart about money? Do they have to do chores to earn money? Do you just give an allowance? Are they free to spend their allowance as they want, or do you insist they save some of it? Tell us what works for you!

Stephanie Williams had planned to give birth to her baby at Nash General Hospital. When she went to the hospital on Wednesday, having labor pains, she was sent home dilated to two centimeters, and told it would be a couple days before the baby would come. Gabrielle Victoria Williams didn't want to wait, and later that day Williams gave birth at her church, with her pastor, Gabriele DeBrow, playing midwife.