"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?")

"I just saw something really upsetting on TV," Betsy says. "It made me realize there are people who will do absolutely anything for money."

I can't tell if my daughter has been watching the World Wrestling Federation or the latest update on political fundraising, but she seems genuinely disturbed.

Her comment piques my curiosity, not to mention that I'm wondering if I should beef up the parental controls on our TV. I brace myself for the possibility that my teenage daughter has seen one of those "documentaries" on brothels in Las Vegas.

"What was it?" I ask tentatively.

"Did you hear that woman screeching in the stands?" my girlfriend asks. We're lingering on the bleachers after a basketball game in which our sons and their teammates' valiant effort couldn't overcome a 15-point deficit.

"Yeah," I said. "You have to wonder what she's thinking."

"I don't think we have to wonder," my friend said. "She didn't seem to let any of her thoughts go unexpressed."

I crack up, because no matter how fervently I deny that I'm a hypercompetitive sports mom, the truth is, when it comes to basketball, I have to be careful. I don't want to be known as a parent with a problem.

My daughter saunters into the kitchen, her head wrapped in a wet towel, her body swaddled in an oversized fleece bathrobe. "What are you thinking?" I say. "Your date for the dance is going to be here any minute."

Looking at the clock, she bolts upstairs to brush her teeth while I plug in the iron to press her best outfit. Before long, we're standing in front of the mirror in my bathroom, where I fire up the blow dryer to dry and style her hair.

"Remember to be ladylike," I say over the hum of the hair dryer. "And use your best manners at dinner."

The thing about caller ID is that it tells you only where a call originates, not what it's about. So when the phone rings and the name of my children's school appears on the handset, I have no choice but to answer it.

Suppose someone is sick? Or hurt? Or in trouble with the assistant principal?

Maybe it isn't a call concerning one of my children, but the child of a family for whom I'm the emergency contact.

I'm compelled to answer the call, but in retrospect, I wish I had let the answering machine take a message the other day. That way I could have avoided this stint as chaperone at the middle school Activity Night.