As a way to get young children hooked to the finest pleasures of life, a wine connoisseur and personal cheese consultant to the celebrities recently held a tasting for kids at the Beverly Hilton, according to Common Ground magazine. (Thanks Amy for the tip!)

The class welcomed eight children between seven and 12 to the aromatic, tactile pleasures of artisan goat cheese and refined sensory appreciation. (Barrie) Lynn directed the kids with basic instructions in looking, smelling and tasting, then set them loose to play with their food. They rolled logs of Montchevre fresh goat cheese from Wisconsin over a variety of toppings spread across the countertop, including Dutch chocolate sprinkles, crushed herbs, crumbled pistachios, chopped dried figs and powdered mild peppers. For accompaniment, Lynn provided several all-natural varietal grape juices served in long-stemmed glassware and introduced the children to a trick she terms “the cheese highway,” in which one sips wine — or, well, juice — over a tongue and palate paved with cheese. The sum experience of flavor fusion could positively affect them forever, says Lynn.

“I think it’s important kids learn to smell, touch and really taste their food. If all kids were conscious of what they were eating and how good it tastes, they wouldn’t just go shoving all sorts of things with no nutritional value into their mouths without thinking twice.”

The magazine did not say what this unique opportunity cost parents. But I laughed as I thought of my four-year-old's reaction. God, he is such a finicky eater. His fine dining is limited to organic frozen pizza.

MSN just compiled a deliciously guilty photo spread and list of celebrities endorsing and even campaigning with their presidential picks. I don't think these endorsements matter -- and may even hurt a candidate -- but I always want to know. :)

Here is a list of who is voting for whom:

Republican Nominee John McCain
Heidi Montag
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Angie Harmon
John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting
Sylvester Stallone
Rip Torn of the "The Larry Sanders Show"
B.J. Novak of "The Office" (Well, at least he posed with him.)
Dick Van Patten of "Eight Is Enough"
Judd Apatow? (Again, he posed with McCain, but has not publicly endorsed or campaigned for him.)
Jon Voight (Angelina Jolie's father)
Tom Selleck

Democratic Nominee Barack Obama
Usher
Maria Shriver
Ben Affleck
Jennifer Garner
Robert De Niro
Chris Rock
Win and William Butler of Arcade Fire
Oprah Winfrey
Stevie Wonder
will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas
Ed Kowalczyk of Live
Jessica Lange
Ne-Yo
Nick Cannon (actor now married to Mariah Carey)
Ben Harper

Who else has endorsed but is not on the list?

I LOVE to read. I read whatever I can get my hands on, from novels to fluff gossip magazines. Admittedly, I haven't read some of the classics, which I hope to change over the summer.

I'm not sure who compiled this list, but it names the following Ten Books To Read Before You Die:

1. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

2. Lord of the Rings (the series), by J.R.R. Tolkien

3. Harry Potter (the series), by J.K. Rowling

4. The Stand, by Stephen King

5. The DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown

6. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

7. Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown

8. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

9. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

10. The Ultimate Hitchers Guid to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Out of the 10 books listed, I've read...three, but have seen a few of the others in movie form. What about you? Have you read the books referenced in the list? Which was your favorite? And if you could amend the list, which would you add or take away?

No Impact Man, is Colin Beavan, the guy who took on living in NYC with no net environmental impact for one year.  In a recent blog post, Beavan talks about how "the cost of living and leisure time rewards of environmental living are harder to reap if you live within a culture that still prioritizes consumption." Now that he is writing his book, instead of researching, Beavan is feeling a bit guilty about things, including how much time his daughter spends in nursery school:

I've been feeling guilty about this, and never more so than on Friday night at the Hudson River Park. That night, my three-year-old Isabella and I sat on the grass. She pretended to be a teacher at her school and instructed me to be Isabella. At one point, presumably reflecting something that happened at school, she grabbed me by the chin and said, "Isabella, if you don't stop talking you will have to stay in the classroom while everyone else gets to go play in the school yard."

Well, here's the thing. I don't want Isabella to stop talking. I want her to talk and talk and talk. I love when she talks. The best thing I ever hear is, "I want to tell you something, Daddy." What is going on in my life that every day she goes to a place where someone might tell her not to talk?

Happy 4th of July all! Hopefully, this means you are enjoying a long weekend.

A friend is in town for a wedding so between entertaining her and attending the wedding that's pretty much where my weekend is going. How about you? Any exciting plans? July 4th rituals?

Have a good weekend all!

Between 1997 and 2003, the country saw teen smoking rates plunge steadily, according to a story in the Washington Post. But as the Post recently reported, those numbers have plateaued between 2003 and 2007, suggesting anti-smoking advocates are not making any more inroads.

One in five teens still smokes, according to Terry Pechacek of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which released the new data:

Pechacek blamed the trend in part on cuts on anti-smoking campaigns by states that had been funded by a nationwide 1998 settlement of a class-action lawsuit against the tobacco industry.

"Many large states had very active campaigns that went off the air," he said, citing Massachusetts, Florida and Mississippi as examples of states that had cut their programs.

At the same time, cigarette companies have continued to increase their spending on promotional activities, including heavily advertising brands that teenagers are most likely to smoke, working to feature smoking in movies and videos and offering pricing incentives that offset increases in cigarette prices.

A spokesman for Altria Group, the parent company of Philip Morris USA, said his company has a number of programs to discourage teen smoking like punishing stores for selling cigarettes to minors.

Well, considering the company has no moral qualms of marketing its deadly products to an 18-year-old -- and the rest of us for that matter -- this sounds like it is simply covering its ass.

The Washington Post's "Ask Amy" columnist recently doled out some harsh words to a cohabiting couple who were wondering if it was couth to ask for money in lieu of wedding presents. (Answer: It is not.)

In some cultures, brides and grooms are traditionally given cash at the wedding. I can see how fetching that idea is to you, but if this is not your cultural tradition, and if asking outright makes you squirm, there is a fair chance it would make your family and friends uncomfortable too.

You've been living together for many years. You've flouted marriage tradition and enjoyed the benefits of cohabitation. Perhaps you could also reject the tradition of expecting gifts to establish a household you already maintain.

It is not your guests' job to help you recoup the cost of the wedding. Your wedding should be a gift from you to your friends and family, who will share this day with you. You shouldn't have a larger wedding than you can afford.

Ouch. But this makes sense.

We, too, got married after three years of living together and grappled with some wedding traditions. Because we had our ceremony in El Salvador, we decided we did not want to lug back a bunch of gifts to California. We actually wrote "no gifts, please" on our wedding invitations, although DH's family insisted on giving us presents since they had no traveling expenses. They gave us typical art and relics from El Salvador, which we so appreciate eight years later.

How did you handle gift-giving and some of the more traditional aspects of the wedding? What did you change? What was unique about your ceremony?

The good thing about getting married in El Salvador in 2000 was how affordable it was. We were able to pay for airfare, hire one of the best salsa bands in the country, have a fireworks display, and a tasty buffet for well under $10,000. Then again, my free wedding planner, dear mother-in-law, was quite resourceful!

Will Smith and his actress wife Jada Pinkett Smith will open a private school in the fall focused on academics and the arts, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The school, New Village Academy, is slated to open this September at the Indian Hills High School campus in the Las Virgenes Unified School District.

In a statement, Will Smith said of the school: "About 10 years ago, Jada and I started dreaming about the possibility of creating an ideal educational environment, where children could feel happy, positive and excited about learning. . . .

"New Village Academy was born of a simple question, 'Is it possible to create an educational environment in which children have fun learning?' Jada and I believe the answer is 'Yes.' "

New Village Academy began about three years ago as a home school for the Smiths' youngest children -- Jaden, 9 and Willow, 7 -- and those of several other families. After an extensive search, Jacqueline Olivier, previously an administrator at private schools in Santa Monica and La Jolla, was hired to head the school...

The school, she said, will use many philosophies, including Montessori, Bruner and Gardner. Olivier said the Smiths would pay nearly $900,000 to lease the Indian Hills High School campus in the Las Virgenes Unified School District for three years. Fall enrollment is expected to be about 40 students and will eventually rise to about 100, she said. The school will include pre-kindergarten through sixth grade, with a top annual tuition of $12,500.

Being celebrities, the opening of their school is already mired in controversy. Among other media outlets, Fox News made a big deal that some of the teachers are Scientologists who will use teaching methods steeped in the religion. But Olivier said the teachers are of many religions, including Scientology, Christian and Muslim -- although the school is secular.

I don't get it. A big deal has been made about the Scientology, but what exactly would it look like in a classroom? The New Village curriculum sounds very rich, including literacy, math, "living skills," Spanish, karate, yoga, robotics, technology, etiquette and art. "Parental involvement is encouraged, as is limited access to television and sugary foods," according to the L.A. Times.

This doesn't sound much different than a montessori, waldorf or any other private school for that matter. What do you think? Is critique of the Smiths' new school warranted?

Sorry I couldn't get the article to link in the text, so there's a weird link at the jump.

Cross-posted at Fussbucket (also can't get the link to work right...)

Sometimes the timeout is a mom's only friend. Gone are the days that many of us would feel comfortable giving our naughty one a swat on the behind, a mouth full of soap, or an admonishment to "Wait until your father gets home!" But according to this article in Slate, we may not be using the technique correctly and might even be reinforcing bad behavior.

Most parents already have a rough working notion of how to use timeouts. When a child does something wrong, you send him off to sit somewhere by himself and do nothing for a set amount of time, like a hockey referee putting a player in the penalty box. Two minutes on a bench for hitting at the playground, five minutes on a stool in the corner for talking back, and so on. Because the timeout seems so simple, most people feel comfortable using it intuitively, guided by assumptions that the punishment should fit the crime, that a timeout gives the child an opportunity to reflect and repent, and that it teaches the child who's in control.

The problem comes when parents use more and longer timeouts. These proportional punishments, such as deciding to leave a child in timeout for only a few minutes for a minor infraction and longer for more egregious behavior, won't help change the behavior that's causing you to give the timeout in the first place, the article says.

Excessive timeouts do more harm than good, making a child irritable and more volatile in his reactions, and more inclined to escape and avoid the adults who punish him. Just as important, parents who punish excessively tend to escalate punishment, increasing the side effects and losing track of the original intent of giving a timeout, which is to improve a child's behavior. The opposite happens, in fact.

article

I know there are a few of us with kids either starting college in the fall, or starting Senior year and so right in the middle of college planning.  And, I don't know about your house, but ours has been a little stressful over the past few months!  My DD is a good student - good grades and good SAT scores - so she has her sights on very competitive colleges (many overlaps with parentalunit's recent college trip!).  I'm proud of her and want the best for her, but I also see the pressure she puts on herself.  In her view, every decision impacts on her college application!

If you like learning about your brain and how your body works, you may enjoy The Itch, by Atul Gawande (The New Yorker, June 30, pp.58-65). It discusses a new theory in neuroscience circles called the "brain's best guess" idea.

[Perception] is the brain's best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picketfence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

The other day, the Washington Post ran a compelling editorial in favor of vouchers for poor D.C. students:

AMONG THE most maddening arguments used against the D.C. school voucher program is that it hurts the public schools. Any money set aside for vouchers comes on top of a generous federal allocation for the city's public and charter schools. Any effect of the vouchers on public education has yet to be established or studied. Most of all, which members of Congress would accept an argument that they should be forced to send their children to a failing school for the good of the school?

Yet critics repeatedly return to this canard. That's why it's important that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) reiterate to Congress that his school reform efforts will not be helped by depriving 1,900 poor children of an opportunity to choose their schools.

I waited for the letters to the editor as I knew there would be some opposition, including this letter writer from the Secular Coalition for America:

For parents who are looking for real school choice, there are public magnet and charter schools. The OSP does not offer school "choice" at all. When the Government Accountability Office published a study on the program last year, it concluded that Opportunity Scholarships fail to deliver the promise of school choice, because the bulk of participating schools are religious. Worse yet, the GAO also noted that the program lacks an opt-out clause for students wishing to avoid religious exercises.

The Post claimed that stopping this federal funding will amount to "depriving 1,900 poor children of an opportunity to choose their schools." But every student is welcome to stay in the school of his or her choice. Why would a school that is supposedly doing a good job be unable to raise private scholarship money for tuition? Students' religious training needs to be privately supported; given the cost of this program to taxpayers and to our secular tradition, extending a five-year mistake into a six-year one is just not justifiable.

Initially, I was torn after reading the Post editorial. No doubt many of the voucher recipients are low-income minority students living in run-down neighborhoods -- pretty much my family in Miami. Thanks to the generosity of the Catholic Church and my parents' own commitment, I received a kindergarten to 8th grade parochial education free of charge.

But I can't speak to the academic stellarness of the school as I feel it lagged behind the public high school I attended in New Hampshire and I easily scored the lowest in the SAT at that school. (My friends in Miami, who continued to attend Catholic high schools, scored even lower!)

I did some research on vouchers at Wikipedia and the Milwaukee voucher system, which is the oldest in the country. As it turns out, this whole voucher debate is much more nuanced than politicians and the media make it out to be.