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My daughter loves to read ''And Tango Makes Three,'' although we haven't read it in quite some time. She loves penguins and thinks that lil Tango is ''oh, so cute!'' Through the book and other real life interactions I believe that she has a good grasp on the idea that families come in many different varieties. But I've been intentional in this ...

Over the Memorial Day weekend we ventured out to The Morton Arboretum or what some affectionately call, The Tree Museum. And boy were we lucky! First, it only rained for a few minutes and second David Rogers' Big Bugs exhibit was on show. Once we paid our entry fee I started to read the ''Bug Detective'' notebook that outlines which bugs are on ...

In January of 2006 Newsweek put four white boys on their cover with the headline ''The Boy Crisis.'' Inside they told the tale that was so shocking that the myth grew so fast that the factual evidence that quickly came out was ignored. What was this myth? That boys were being left behind. By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in ...

I am a jeans and t-shirt gal and I have Amelia Bloomer to thank for it. I hated wearing dresses & skirts as a kid because my mom never let me wear shorts or pants underneath so that I could still play on the monkey bars. Even thou I have made my peace with dresses and my daughter practically lives in her black and white plaid skirt, I know ...

In case you haven't heard, the Chicago Public Schools will be opening a few new schools next year and they are magnets plus a gifted center. So you CPSers know what that means - LOTTERY TIME! More choices in that whole ''school choice'' thing. In reality we know it's more school luck than choice, but put as the commercials say, you can't win if ...

Of course you do! One of my favorite indie stores is having a contest to cap off Women's History Month:Please post [at Sticker Sisters] about [a brave woman or girl] you know or [one] you admire from a far. On April 1st [Ariel will] pick one of the posts out of a hat and that person will get a free Brave Girl t-shirt!Shirts come in kids sizes ...

We all know that the Chicago Public Schools are in a state of um, flux. They are trying things that other school systems don't do or maybe even, don't need. One of the experiments that seem to work in some schools is the Local School Council:Local School Councils (LSCs) are elected bodies at nearly every Chicago Public Schools (CPS) elementary, ...

There are days when my husband & I joke around about shipping our sassy & (some days too) precocious daughter to boarding school. Thus it intrigued me to see the headline - No small plan: Public boarding schools for Chicago - in Friday's Chicago Tribune. Low and behold...the first time I've ever said ''Brilliant!'' about CPS. Yes, I know ...

Do you ever read headlines and you interpret them as your failure? That's what I did when I read yesterday that 1 in 4 teenaged girls have a STD.The overall STD rate among the 838 girls in the study was 26 percent, which translates to more than 3 million girls nationwide, researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ...

The hardest part about raising a daughter has been watching my mouth. I swear a lot. I use the F-word A LOT. I also take almost any opening I get to say something negative about my body.''Oh these chicken breasts are huge!'' I bet they could at least button their shirt. As women, I think we all do this. As a woman who isn't a size 8 much ...