Just before bed last night, my 10-year-old son started sneezing and coughing. Like me, he unfortunately suffers from allergies, and we spent the whole day yesterday outside with our friends at their house in Illinois. Our neighbors down south are just a bit further along than we are in the springtime season, so his allergies were going haywire by the time we started driving home.

Listening to him sniffle and hack before bed, I realized that even though he had medicine, he still sounded terrible. In these swine-flu times, that earned him a day home from school today.

Even though I felt 98 percent positive that his problems were just allergies, I couldn't get to 100 percent. And since I couldn't, and with all the media alerts, I decided to keep him home.

I've noticed over the past week that people who show signs of illness are our new social pariahs. At the packed grocery store last night, people were backing away from a woman who was coughing in the cereal aisle. A few seemed genuinely irritated at her, even though she was covering her mouth and appeared to be trying to keep it under control.

Who knows? She might have just sipped some water and swallowed wrong. But from the reaction, it was clear that the majority of shoppers were pretty sure she was H1N1 positive and wanted to be as far away from what she was sending out as possible.

So I kept my boy home today to prevent him from being ostracized -- and to give myself another day to get to 100 percent.

MilwaukeeMoms.com is pleased to announce an extra-special fun night for us moms! The Skylight Theatre is throwing a party for us starting at 6 p.m. on Thursday, May 21. Get your girlfriends together and mark your calendars!

Click here for all the details!

My daughter's been on the honor roll since she started middle school. At her school, they mail out bumperstickers to the parents of honor-roll students -- something you can stick on the back of your car to let everyone know that your kid's doing her homework, passing the tests and otherwise measuring up just fine.

I feel a little guilty about it, but I've never put the bumperstickers on my car. I don't judge those who do, I just haven't done it. Ask me why and I don't have a good reason, but I think it has to do with my pursuit of lack of perfection. In other words, I'm more comfortable making sure that the warts show than the manicure.

I'm trying and I'm learning, but I admit I have a bit of a hard time with people -- especially moms -- who paint a ridiculously rosy picture of their children and their family lives.

If you're a mom of a newborn or even up to age 6 months, you get a pass. You can say that your child is perfect. Your child has yet to tell you "no." Your child has not yet run away from you in a busy parking lot or a crowded store. Your child likely hasn't ripped a toy from another child's hands yet or loudly asked your great-aunt why her breath smells so bad or refused to wear the gorgeous Christmas dress you bought and just couldn't wait to get on her.

As for the rest of us? We have no excuses.

Even the best, bound-for-Harvard kid has moments. Lots of moments.

I feel a little sorry for parents who can't let their guard down for even one minute to admit that their kids aren't always perfect. My close friends and I have been dishing these stories to each other since we all fell into this parenting game, and for that I am grateful. But to me it doesn't matter if I've known you 10 years or 10 minutes, if you ask me about my kids, you're going to get honesty -- the good, the bad and the crap that really ticks me off.

Not all parents are that way. The Best Foot Forward Club instead prefers to tell you how their offspring taught themselves to read in the womb (yes, it was dark, but when you're gifted, it all works out) and now are playing the best, most challenging position in every sport. Oh, and did they mention that as a baby their child potty trained in one day and now as a preteen is having difficulty deciding whether to start a new club to fight global warming or to end local poverty?

Get stuck with one of these at the coffee shop and it's enough to make you get that whipped cream on top of the mocha. Drown your sorrows, baby, drown your sorrows.

What makes parenting interesting to me is the real life in it all -- and that includes the warts and imperfections.

So I treasure the story of the mom who let her unreasonable 4-year-old wear a swimming suit in the dead of winter because she pitched a fit and insisted she would not be cold.

I die laughing about the boy who, at age 7, begged to be left home alone while his mom ran to a neighbor's house to pick up another child, then called 911 as soon as she left, asking the dispatcher, "Do you think a 7-year-old should be left home alone?"

I love the one about the little boy who came home from school and tried really hard to start a fire in the house with a magnifying glass because he saw some kids doing it on the playground while studying science. (OK, this one's mine.)

So please don't judge me if I don't seem as interested in your kid's accomplishments as I am in the time they tried to use your new steak knives to cut down the tree your neighbor just planted. Anybody who studies hard can be on the honor roll. But that kind of creativity? Now that's worthy of a bumpersticker.

My phone rang yesterday around dinner time, and my sister's number showed up. It was her birthday, so I answered the phone singing happy birthday wishes to her -- only to realize it was her husband calling.

"Jeanne, I have an idea for you to write about," he said. He was calling from his car, and just saw an example of the subject he wanted me to tackle, so he felt compelled to call right away.

The pressing issue he wanted me to write about? Groups of women taking exercise walks in the street who don't move aside for cars. At the time he was calling me, he just passed three women -- walking in a row -- who were taking up the better part of the narrow road he needed to drive down. I'm going to put it more politely than he did when I say that what was bugging him was that they wouldn't get out of his way.

I laughed because his ranting and raving was pretty funny, but then he stopped: "Oh, you probably don't have this problem because you've got sidewalks."

Bingo. And besides, I'm one of those women who walks with friends, occasionally on roads without sidewalks, and yep, we're in the road. Taking up space meant for drivers. We should do a better job of moving aside for cars. Sorry about that.

So while his pet peeve surely isn't mine, I do have my own that seems to spiral up at this time of year. Mine is people who walk their dogs without leashes, and there's a lot more of them in spring than in winter.

I've written before about my dog, but I'm not sure I ever included this detail. My dog loves people, but hates other dogs. He's small -- only 25 pounds -- and has a large dose of Napoleon complex, so when he sees another dog come running, it's not fun playtime. It's time to attack. 

As a result, my dog is on a short leash, literally, and we use one of those Gentle Leader things too for better doggy control.

What I can't control is when another dog comes running at mine. "Don't worry," the well-meaning owners of the other dog yell as they slowly walk up to their pet. "He's friendly!"

Bad news for "Friendly": My dog's not. Wish he was, but he isn't. I don't want my dog to bite your dog, but I've done everything I can to prevent it. The rest is out of my hands.

It's a small thing, but, like the women walking in the street, it's definitely one of those adjustments that comes with warmer weather. After our solitary winters, we have to remember what it's like to bump into each other again as we go about our daily lives.

And if we can do it without any biting, all the better.

After nearly a year of debating whether or not to get Amazon's Kindle e-reader (during which time Kindle was replaced by Kindle 2 and then the family grew to add Kindle 3), I finally made up my mind once and for all.

Instead of the Kindle, I went with the iPod Touch -- essentially the iPhone without the phone. The first app I downloaded was the free one from Amazon that turns your iPod Touch (or iPhone) into a Kindle, albeit with a smaller screen. Aaaahhh, I have to say that it really felt good to scratch that technology itch that had been in a hard-to-reach place for nearly 12 months.

As parents who own iPods know, this is more than just a fun gadget for mom or dad. There are lots of free apps you can download that will entertain the kids too, which is perfect when you're waiting at the doctor's office and trying to distract a child who's about to get a shot. Turn on that iPod and let your child play a game, strum a guitar neck or practice addition facts (yeah, right), and this is the best $225 you ever spent.

The problem comes in when the child always wants to play with your iPod. After all, this toy is ... well ... mine! And maybe I don't want sticky fingers mucking up my clean screen and maybe I want to listen to music or read a book -- not watch a child make drawings or chase fish around with his or her fingers.

But what's a parent to do? Toy manufacturers think they can create new products to trick kids into thinking they've got a similar gadget to mom and dad, but kids see right through this. LeapFrog just introduced Text & Learn, its attempt at making a $25 kid-friendly "Blackberry," but I'm betting five minutes tops with this thing before your child is begging for your real Blackberry back.

Trust me, you will not confuse your child into thinking his Blackberry is cool. It is not yours, it does nothing and cost much less, therefore, even a child's brain can conclude, it's a worthless piece of junk.

We had this problem when our son was little and the only thing he wanted in the world was the TV remote. If the remote was left on a low table or the couch, he'd hustle over there faster than you can sing "Elmo's World" and start pressing buttons like a house on fire. We tried to buy him his own toy remote, fussing and oohhing and ahhhing over it like it was the real thing, but his attention lasted about two seconds before he was off on the hunt for the remote that actually did something other than light up and play music.

Which, come to think of it, might have been the play remote's problem. What is a remote doing playing music? Real remotes don't play music -- they light up. Maybe the lighting up would have been enough? 

Ditto for fake car-key remotes, fake laptops, fake cell phones. Too much flash, not enough function.

I doubt many of us would be happy with some blazingly colorful, shiny facsimile of something we really wanted. Imagine getting a garage-door opener that played "Yankee Doodle Dandy" but doesn't actually do anything like open the garage. Frustrating!

So save the $25 you would spend on this type of thing and squirrel it away in an account somewhere. Don't worry, you'll eventually need it to replace the remote/cell phone/iPod/car keys or whatever your child destroyed in the pursuit of something real.

My sister-in-law is pregnant with twins and we're just weeks away from her baby shower. By now I'm sure her copy of "What to Expect When You're Expecting" is dog-eared and bookmarked.

Which, to be honest, I'm not always so sure is a good thing. Not just for my sister-in-law, but for expecting moms everywhere.

Between "What to Expect When You're Expecting" and the Internet (AKA Dr. Google), it's a wonder that pregnant women get any sleep at all before that first baby arrives.

When I was pregnant with my daughter 13 years ago, I bought a copy of "What to Expect" just about as soon as the pregnancy test turned up positive. The Internet was around, but not in its current form, of course, so I didn't spend much time researching pregnancy -- and all the things that can go wrong -- that I'm sure I would today.

Nope, the book was enough for me. I was the first among my friends to be pregnant, so I approached "What to Expect" without, well, expectations. I didn't know what to expect, no one had told me much, and just about every subject related to having a baby seemed to be covered in the book, so I figured I was in good hands.

What I didn't know was that by page 40, I'd be a full-blown pregnancy hypochondriac. As the pages turned, I found myself searching for signs of chloasma, edema, excessive saliva, varicose veins, dry eyes and every other horrible pregnancy-related weirdness explained in the book -- some of which was downright disturbing. After a few weeks, it dawned on me that reading "What to Expect" didn't really make me feel better or more in control of my pregnancy experience.

In fact, it terrified me.

So I set "What to Expect" aside for the most part, and only read the little month-by-month intro pieces that told me how big the baby was at that point and maybe a few tips on things to look out for. That was plenty for me and also plenty for my doctor's office, too. I'm sure the nurses were sick of answering my constant questions about potential pregnancy threats -- especially since I exhibited zero symptoms.

The benefit of hindsight kept me from picking up "What to Expect" much when I was pregnant with my second child, and I think I was the better for it. And even though the Internet was bigger and better, I had a little one at home, so not much time to surf for imaginary problems.

In the end, I'm glad I had the book but it was best when I actually used it as a reference from time to time rather than required daily reading. Turns out that I did want to know what to expect in very general terms, but that's it. What to expect in specific, horrifying detail? Not so much.