"What's your favorite music video?" one of the children at the lunch table asked. A flurry of titles and artists' names was bandied about the sixth-grade section of the cafeteria.

My daughter didn't know about any of them because all of the favorites aired on MTV. Instead, Katie mentioned a music video she had seen on the Disney Channel. After an almost imperceptible pause, the group burst out laughing.

"You are so sheltered," one of the girls taunted.

My friend Jen knows how to get a rise out of me. All she has to do is send an e-mail with a link to a news story about tweens.

Last week, she found an article about the new trend among tween girls to have professional hair treatments such as highlights, lowlights, chemical straighteners and permanent curls. Unlike the home treatments we may have had our moms do for us when we were teens, pre-teenagers today get their moms to plunk down upward of $45 for a salon visit to get streaks of color not found in nature.

According to the salon owner quoted in the article, girls as young as 6 sometimes come in for color streaks in their hair, though she admitted "8 to 12 is more the norm."

If it's 9 p.m. Tuesday, it must be time for dinner. Now if only I had thought to get to the grocery store earlier in the day. Sigh.

The dinnertime challenge around our house isn't just figuring out what to feed the troops — although that's certainly part of it. I have teenagers who still think it's "yucky" to eat tomatoes.

No, like most families, our challenge is to manage our respective schedules in such a way that we're all in the house and hungry at the time I coincidentally serve a hot meal.

If it's 9 p.m. Tuesday, it must be time for dinner. Now if only I had thought to get to the grocery store earlier in the day. Sigh.

The dinnertime challenge around our house isn't just figuring out what to feed the troops — although that's certainly part of it. I have teenagers who still think it's "yucky" to eat tomatoes.

No, like most families, our challenge is to manage our respective schedules in such a way that we're all in the house and hungry at the time I coincidentally serve a hot meal.

A long line of pet owners already waits at the reception desk when I walk into the small-animal clinic, yet the two women behind the counter don't seem to be helping anyone. Instead, one secretary stands next to her chair looking helpless and waiting for direction, while the other one — obviously the alpha secretary — talks into the headset hooked around her ear.

"Raisins?" she asks. "How many?"

Silence. We all wait while the caller on the other end of the phone responds.

"What kind of chocolate?"

More silence. We're gradually getting the picture, knowing glances passing among the dog owners vying for service from the staff.

"It depends on how much milk chocolate he had," she finally says.

They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. What happened in between this year was something like a fox, at least around my house.

Here are some March highlights in the life of Amy, my fifth-grader:

• Visited orthodontist

• Participated in science fair

• Learned what prostitutes do for a living

Thank you, Eliot Spitzer, for that last little educational nugget.

Sigh.

"Homework?" I ask as Amy settles into the van and clicks her seat belt.

"Math and English. And I have to color a page for social studies."

I figure these tasks will consume roughly a half-hour of my daughter's afternoon — just the right amount of time to support the day's lessons, but not so much that she'll still be sitting at the kitchen table hovering over her books when it's time for the rest of us to assemble there for dinner.

"Sounds easy," I say.

"Mom, it's math," she says.

Say no more.

There was a time when my family practically had our own exam room at the pediatrician's office. Four children meant we had four sets of ears to infect, four sets of tonsils that eventually had to come out and four bodies to measure, mend and medicate.

Winters blew in with wind, ice, snow and viruses. I had the doctor's office on speed dial and even mastered the art of getting in right after lunch break for the quickest service. I was a pro, pediatrically speaking.

Without my noticing, my trips to the pediatrician began to taper off. I went from being a "frequent flier" mom who knew the names of all the nurses on the office staff to a mom of four relatively healthy children whose medical needs could be handled in annual check-ups and the occasional office visit.

There I sat in the nail salon, wondering just exactly what my nail technician and her co-workers were chatting about in their native Vietnamese (assuming, neurotically, it was me) when I saw something I haven't seen in a long time.

I saw an exhibition of great parenting. It was a simple thing, really, but one that has become remarkably rare.

A young mom was seated across from my spot at the U-shaped manicure bar. Her little girl — a preschooler of about 4 — had been waiting patiently for her mom to be finished. After a while, she wandered across the salon to the pedicure chairs and started rolling empty seats to and fro.

My eyelids get heavier by the moment, but there's no way I'm turning out the light to fall asleep.

It's 10:30 on a Sunday night, a good 30 minutes past the time I expected to hear from my daughter that her plane had landed. She spent the weekend in Florida with her grandparents, enjoying a brief reprieve from dorm life and winter weather.

The trip was wonderful, except for the parts where she had to travel. Between flight delays, surly airline employees and storm fronts, she had her fill of stress. Plus, I forgot to tell her to have cash on hand for a snack on the plane. ("They charge for pretzels? What is our world coming to?")