My sons—ages 13 and soon-to-be-9—like eating out. Most times, my younger son is happy with a well-cooked burger smothered in ketchup, spaghetti or chicken fingers. (Although he’s in love with a Peruvian chicken and rice dish that’s made at Cholo’s Kitchen in New Rochelle.)

My older son has more champagne taste: Present him with a menu that offers baby lamb chops, lobster, tenderloin, scallops or squid, and he’ll order one of those meals. And he’ll actually eat it. And enjoy it. While he can also chow down on burgers and fries, when he’s in a “real” restaurant, it’s fancy food that he wants.

Apparently, according to a recent news story, he’s not alone: There are a lot of kids who actually enjoy eating upscale. And I’m lucky enough to have one of them. It’s basically OK with us, except on those occasions when we’re hoping to grab a quick, cheap meal, and our son wants Lobster Thermidor.

My son may have acquired his love of fine food from me: When I was a teenager, my friends and I formed a club called C’est Chic, and mostly, we visited fine restaurants in Manhattan. We did rollerskate every now and then (at former The Rink in New Rochelle, which is now the site of my church, New York Covenant, if you can believe that!), but mainly, we ate. Rather, we dined. Exquisitely.

Are your kids into fine dining? What do they enjoy most? And what restaurants are their favorites?

It’s summertime and the living is allegedly easy, right? Then why am I so stressed?

Because while my sons are taking it easy, I’m becoming unglued about keeping any semblance of a schedule together. My boys, ages 8 and 13, are in day camp this summer. My older son takes a school bus there and back and my husband or I drive our younger son to camp. I alternate afternoon pickups with another mom/friend. That part works pretty well.

Where it all seems to fall apart is at home. In the mornings, the boys get up—with much prodding from us—only after listening to the alarm clock blare incessantly. And then they plod slowly about the house, taking forever to wash up, dress and eat breakfast. The morning usually involves them getting their lunch or snack together too, since they’re not so diligent about preparing everything the night before.

So what happens? I end up fussing about them being late, which results in my rushing to get ready in less time and feeling stressed about it all. And today, my older son, in his haste to make the bus, left his keys at home. And guess who had to make a dash home this afternoon to let him in (and then return to work)? Moi.

My husband and I admit some fault in this. Because it’s summer, we’ve relaxed the rules somewhat: They can stay up later and we’ve been letting them play video games and watch TV during the week. They’ve been doing some reading for school and my younger son has been working in the summer workbook we got for him. My younger son is an avid reader, so he’s already finished about four books and his written two of the three book reports that will be due the first day of school. My older son isn’t as voracious a reader, so he’s moving a little more slowly, usually picking up a book in the few minutes before he falls off to sleep. But that’s about it for brain exercise.

I hate to swing the parental hammer on them, but I feel like I’ve got to restore some sense of order at home. How do you let your kids relax—but not too much—during the summer?

This is one of those weeks where I remember how much respect I have for single parents.

My husband and older son are away for the week, leaving my 8-year-old and I home together. We’re having a great time, taking evening walks, reading Pokemon books, and mostly, NOT having to do any homework.

But because his dear mother failed to read the fine print on his camp application, we had a week of “gap time” between the end of the school year and the beginning of camp. This came as a complete shock to me about two weeks ago. What to do with my son while I work and my husband is out of town? I had to come up with  a plan. Fast. And thanks to a wonderful father and a network of fantastic friends, I’ve been able to make it work.

My dad took care of my son on Monday. No easy feat for a 79-year-old, but they went to the movies, ate out, hung out at home (my father even introduced him to a few new chores. Thanks, Daddy!) until I got home from work. Tuesday, my son’s friend’s mom invited him to spend the day with them, which was a godsend. He’s going back there on Thursday. On Friday, I’ll be off and will entertain my son and will help out the mom who helped me by watching her daughter.

The crux was Wednesday: I had lined up a sitter for my son, but she had to cancel on Monday. Uh-oh. Things were crumbling. I immediately pulled out my Palm and called several young people who once worked at my son’s after-school program. These young adults know my son, are extremely responsible (they sometimes watch my boys when we go out) and have somewhat flexible schedules. And, I have to say, they are some of the most caring people I know. I called three of them and left messages. In an hour, my son had three options for childcare. All of them even offered to alter their work schedules to accommodate mine.

It made me realize that I am truly blessed with a wonderful father and excellent friends, and without them, I wouldn’t be able to make this parenting gig work. I hope I can return the favors to them many times, in many different ways.

As a parent, who do you lean on to help you out in crises?

I’m getting up earlier these days and sticking my son on a bus for his daily trek upstate to day camp. Summer must be here.

Truth is he loves his day camp, and he comes home happy and tired. That’s all a parent can really ask for at the end of the day. I do envy stay-at-home parents during the summer, however, because of all the activities they have time for and their freedom to waste away the days with the kids.

But there’s still plenty you can do. Take a look at this list I came upon. It’s a list of things to do with your kids over the summer, put out by the L.A.-based Celerity Educational Group.

Personally, I think these are all good projects to do with your kids throughout the year. But summer is a particularly important time to keep a young brain active and “expand on the classroom knowledge they gained during the year,” said the group’s founder and CEO, Vielka McFarlane. The idea, she said, is to “motivate and stimulate their minds and bodies.”

Take a look:

6 Tips for Keeping Your Kids Busy During the Summer

Build – Have them build a kite, a bird house, a boat or even a Lego structure. Building accesses spatial temporal reasoning and improves fine motor skills. More importantly, most kids get absorbed in the process of creation.

Cook – Have kids help in the kitchen or become Chefs for the day. Cooking utilizes reading skills, math skills and basic judgment. The finished product will produce pride and self-confidence. It also gives the parent a mini-vacation.

Chess and Scrabble – Chess accesses math and sequencing skills. It is an excellent way of keeping your child’s mind active and quick. Also, many public libraries have chess clubs that meet so your child will have the opportunity to compete. Additionally, Scrabble is an excellent way of building your child’s vocabulary and perfecting their dictionary skills. You can also compete with your child to keep their skills agile.

Art – Summer art projects can be great for keeping your kids busy. Get them outside have them work on landscapes paintings or drawings. Or have them work on a found art project. Looking for components for their project can become a treasure hunt. The art supplies you provide can be minimal. The point is to give them ideas for their creation.

Write – Activate your child’s story telling abilities by reading them a portion of a story and having them finish the story in their own words. Younger children can also illustrate their stories. Writing flexes the entire brain and is beneficial for a child’s development and success in school.

Take A Tour – Taking tours can be fun and educational for you and your children. Contact your local newspaper or TV station and ask about arranging a tour. Learn about the inner workings of the media industry. Go to a museum or see an art exhibit find out exactly how art imitates life. Take a trip to the zoo and take in the sites and sounds of the wildlife. Spend a day in another world while experiencing life first hand.

I feel like a kid myself this week. I am SO happy that the school year is coming to a close, I’m literally walking with a little more pep in my step.

My sons have done well in school this year, but I am very tired of homework, projects, meetings, and everything else. And then I realized I have one more task to complete: Teacher (and bus driver/monitor and caregiver) presents.

Stacy Anderson, a new reporter at The Journal News (and my mentee!) wrote a piece on teacher gifts that ran Saturday. That sparked me to remember the shopping I have left to do for 8-year-old son’s teacher, bus driver and bus monitor, along with the young people who supervise him at his after-school center.

It’s not a job I mind doing, because I really am grateful for all of the adults who help my son along the way by teaching him, protecting him and simply caring for him. Some parents are against such gifts, because they believe that the adults are simply doing their jobs and deserve no additional thanks. But I think differently: These folks all looking out for my boy when my husband and I not around. And for that, I am eternally grateful. I make sure that my sons express their thanks too—in writing—even though my oldest son, now 13 and a middle schooler, no longer buys gifts for his teachers.

Unlike some people in the story, though, I won’t be buying personalized gifts, apple-themed presents or anything like that. I’d rather buy them something they can put to immediate use: gift cards to department stores and restaurants, gift certificates for car washes, things like that. And I’ll accompany the gift with a note of thanks. I think it’s a small effort, considering how much they’ve taught my son this year and how patient they’ve been with him.

Do you buy end-of-the-school-year teacher gifts? Do your kids write thank-you notes to teachers or anyone else? Have any innvoative gift ideas? Share them here.

When you have children, it seems like you’re always buying birthday presents.

In our family, I’m the buyer of birthday gifts. It fell to me and not my husband, because, well, I like shopping a little more than he does.

Lately, it seems that the cost of these presents has risen quite a bit. I recall when my 13-year-old was a preschooler, I could easily buy a nice kid’s present for $15 or less. As my kids got older, the stakes were raised a little bit, and the norm for a present was about $20 to $25. I could live with that.

But then one year, when my son was about 10, someone bought him a PlayStation game. A PlayStation game?! They run about $40 to 50! That seemed awfully extravagant to me, especially coming from one kid to another. So now, I’m trying to hold down the spending to no more than $30, but then my sons remind me that “Johnny” bought them Madden 2007, so we HAVE to get him a new video game, too.

I’m not in agreement with that. I don’t want to get into any tit-for-tat present-giving; I want them to give gifts because they think that’s what the person would like, not because the value matches the gift they received. But with the way some parents are spending, it’s becoming difficult to keep that lesson in check.

Are you finding the same thing? And how do you deal with it?

How old was your child when he or she started kindergarten? Or, if you have a younger child, when do you plan to enroll him or her? This question is getting more scrutiny these days as some communities are debating the starting ages for kids to discourage parents of too-young children from enrolling them in school.

There is an lengthy story on this topic in the New York Times. The report talks about some classes where there a 15-month divide between the youngest and oldest kids. The story details the complex reasons some favor older kindergarteners — from helping the child excel to helping the school improve scores on national tests when they roll around in a few years. Of course, for working parents who have children in preschool or daycare programs, the sooner a child enters kindergarten, the sooner the hefty bills stop. (If your community has full-day kindergarten, that is. Mine does not.)

Since Pumpkin was born in May and has her “due date” birthday on July 27, this won’t be a question for us. She’ll be 5 when she goes to kindergarten. But for parents whose children were born in September and October, they have a choice of waiting a year or entering the child at age 4. What did you do or what will you do? If your child was older, did he or she benefit? And if your child was younger, did it turn out OK?

When I was a kid, I don’t think my mother worried about how many hours I spent in the sun. By the time I was a teenager, I regularly used suntan-enhancing products — like baby oil! Today, we know better. There are probably few parents who have not given sun protection some thought — even if they ultimately decide the risks are overblown. Please check out our new poll that asks you to share your sun-protection strategy.

I’m also planning a story that explores new technologies and materials that are being developed to guard against sunburn — and the skin cancer it can ultimately cause.

I plan to take a look at the new play clothes that come with built-in sun protection, like this romper from One Step Ahead. I’ll also explore stick-on patches that measure exposure to the sun, like the Huggies Little Swimmers Sun Sensors. For the geek on the beach, there are also electronic UV monitors, like this one from Oregon Scientific that calculates your recommended exposure time based on the strength of the Sun’s rays, what SPF sunscreen you are wearing and your own personal skin type. Pretty neat.

Comment on this blog or send me an e-mail at jalterio@lohud.com if you would like to be part of the story.

And don’t forget to vote in the poll at right!

For many parents, a night out—or planning a night out— is often a headache.

Who’ll watch the kids? What will they do? What will we make them for dinner? It’s enough for to make you give up and stay home.

The YWCA of White Plains and Central Westchester is here to help. On Friday, June 8, they’ll provide the place, the pizza and the pool, so that your kids (ages 5 to 12) can have a great night out, while you have a great night out, too—elsewhere. The program runs from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. and kids will be served pizza, have a swim and be able to take part in a variety of games and other activities. They should be plenty tuckered out by the time you pick them up.

Care is provided by members of the YWCA staff and adult-child ratio for the evening will be 1:10 or lower, says Nicole Stansbury, who’s directing the program.

The cost isn’t bad either, considering how much babysitters can charge these days: It’s $50 for the first child and $20 for each additional child. You don’t have to be a member of the YWCA, either. There’s a discount for kids who already attend the YWCA’s Kids Connection Afterschool Program – for them it’s $30 for the first child and $15 for each additional child. Payment is cash only and you must reserve a spot before June 6.

For more information or to make a reservation, call Nicole Stansbury at 914-949-6227, ext. 109 before June 6.

If you’re a semi-regular reader of Parents’ Place, you probably already know that I’m not crafty. I don’t embroider, quilt or scrapbook and the only things that excite me in stores like Michael’s are fancy pens.

So when I recently saw a note from my younger son’s school inviting him and other second and third-graders to attend their final book club meeting dressed as their favorite character, I broke out in a sweat. Dress up? On a Tuesday night? And the meeting begins at 6:30 p.m. and I get home at 6:15 p.m.? I silently prayed that my 8-year-old son would select a character who just happens to be, say, another 8-year-old third-grade boy. Something that would require me to do nothing except take him there.

No such luck.

My son chose to be Ben, a character from Jean Van Leeuwen’s book, Hannah’s Winter of Hope. In the book, Ben is a colonial soldier being held prisoner by the British, who eventually returns home to his family in 17th-century Fairfield, Connecticut. For costuming purposes, Ben had to appear injured. As he and I thought about what he might wear, it seemed possible. Even for uncrafty me.

My son came up with the notion to wear a shirt with a camouflage on it, to capture the military look. Then, we discovered gauze—lots of it. I wrapped some around his head and his arm. We made a sling for his arm from one of my scarves. And then we found a crutch from one of my husband’s old injuries and – ta da! – Ben was back from the 17th century. And it took just about 15 minutes to create him.

When my son walked into the meeting, the principal and the kids all stared, thinking that he was really seriously injured. Then they realized he was in costume. He was pleased. His mom, the uncrafty one, was thrilled. Sometimes, I suppose, things just work out.

Tell me some of your parenting successes. We all need a pat on the back sometimes, don’t we?

Last Saturday, my 13-year-old son was preparing to head out to a neighborhood park to shoot some hoops with his friends. The park is about a mile from our house, so he usually rides his bike there.

I watched as he got on his bike, his ball in a backpack, and headed up the hill. For a minute I got a little misty-eyed, thinking, “Wow. He’s growing up. Going to the park all by himself.” And then, abruptly, I sputtered his name out the door, calling him back. I realized that he wasn’t wearing his protective helmet.

He came right back and said, “But Dad said I didn’t have to wear the helmet.”

“Dad who? Your Dad?” I couldn’t believe that his father, my husband—the man who was once a racing cyclist and makes me wear a helmet all the time, even though I whine about it being too tight—gave him the OK to ride helmetless.

Apparently my son told my husband that he’s the “only” kid in his group of friends who still has to wear a helmet and that it’s no longer “cool.” Well, too bad, I told him. We’ve been making him wear a helmet for all these years, when he rides in our driveway, on a bike path, or in a park. But now, when he’s riding alone and with traffic, I’m going to allow him to ride without a helmet? Nope, nope, nope.

My husband, who apparently had lost his mind temporarily, stepped in and ‘fessed up that he gave in to our son, but after hearing my rant, realized that I was right and told him to get his helmet. But apparently, the helmet is so uncool that he put his bike away and walked to the park instead. Later, he asked if we could buy him a new, cooler helmet (whatever that is) and we said we’d consider it. But we reiterated that there will be no cycling without a helmet. If I have to slap on a helmet and look uncool (but be safe) to ride a bike, he does too.

How would you have handled this? All suggestions are welcome.

I know I’ve written about this before, but I’m still stumped: How do you handle school vacations when your child is too old for “vacation camps” but too young to stay home alone all day?

A colleague proposed this solution: Kid co-ops. It works like this: A group of parents – preferably those whose children are friends – gathers together and divides school vacation days so that each parent takes the same amount of time off from work and watches a group of kids for the day. The key is making sure that everyone who takes on the kids for a day or two receives that same amount of childcare in return. The benefit? Your child is cared for and you don’t have to use several vacation days to cover every school vacation.

This sounds like a good idea and perhaps it’s something that I’ll keep in mind for the future. For more information about how to begin, check out this site. It’s full of guidelines and tips to help get your childcare/babysitting co-op off the ground.

Do you participate in a childcare or babysitting co-op? How is it working out for you and your family?

I’m writing a story about a Web site called BrainPOP, which was started by a Bedford resident and doctor named Avraham Kadar. This site is tremendously popular in schools, where millions of kids watch animated movies about everything from the brain to solar energy to Elvis Presley. What’s especially neat are the topical videos that help children understand current events. The video on the Asian tsunami was the company’s most viewed video ever, Dr. Kadar told me. There’s also a math video on the Fibonacci Sequence, which will actually mean something to people who’ve read “The Da Vinci Code.” And in March, in honor of women’s history month, there are videos about Maya Angelou, Frida Kahlo, Anne Frank, Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart and others.

I’d love to talk to parents about their children’s reaction to BrainPOP as well as teachers about using the videos in the classroom. Shoot me an e-mail at jalterio@lohud.com if you’d like to be interviewed for my story.

This weekend, my 13-year-old son was sick, with an ear infection, of all things. He has had perhaps three such infections his entire life (thank goodness!), so my husband and I don’t have a lot of experience with these things.

While it was unnerving to see this boy, who plays basketball nearly 24/7, lay listlessly on the couch all weekend, it was also unnerving to have to cross another milestone: swallowing pills.

At 13, he is now too old for the dosages listed with “children’s” medicine bottles, so he has to take “adult” medicines. And most adult medicines don’t come in liquid forms. So the Motrin that the doctor prescribed had to be taken as a pill.

Uh-oh.

He’s never had to take a pill. The few medicines he’s taken have been either liquids or chewable tablets. I stared hard at the shelves at CVS, but I didn’t notice any liquid Motrin for people his age. So, I bought some coated tablets and hoped for the best.

A friend remembered that her mother taught her to take pills by wrapping them in small piece of bread and then getting her swallow that. I kind of recall my grandmother and mother offering me the same advice. Another friend suggested putting the pills in either pudding or applesauce and then having him slurp the medicine with the food.

The doctor didn’t have much advice for teaching a kid to swallow pills. “Tell him to put it way back in his throat and take a big gulp of water,” she said. Thankfully, that actually worked, although there was some initial sputtering.

So far, he seems to be OK with swallowing small, coated pills. But I would imagine that larger pills or capsules might be problematic.Anyone have suggestions for introducing kids to swallowing pills?

I think I like to bake. I say “I think” because sometimes, I really do like to bake.

But as I sit here at 12:19 a.m., waiting for the oven timer to signal the end of baking a batch of cupcakes for my son’s third-grade class, I’m not so sure that I like baking.

I volunteered to bake cupcakes for the class’ Valentine’s Day party, which is tomorrow. (Uh, that would be today, since it’s now after midnight on Thursday.) I typically don’t mind doing this, except that I forgot all about the cupcakes today, until the thought struck me at about 11 p.m.

I remembered the task well on Sunday afternoon, when I stood in Stop and Shop, looking at a package of 24 beautifully decorated cupcakes, already perfect in a ready-to-carry case, for well under $10. I picked them up. Put them in the cart. Then remembered my son’s words: “I can’t wait to make the cupcakes with you, Mom.” So I put back the pretty, ready-made, easy-to-carry, reasonably priced cupcakes. Instead, I picked up some pink and white sprinkles, cake mix, canned frosting (there is no reason in the world to make cupcakes from scratch for 8-year-olds) and headed home.

Tonight, my son had nothing to do with the baking of these cupcakes, since I  started them long after his bedtime. But since he has a two-hour school delay tomorrow, I’ll save the frosting and sprinkling and we can do that together after he gets up. He’ll be happy. I’ll be sleepy.

But as I sit here, waiting for the timer to ring, I’m really thinking of the beautifully decorated Stop & Shop cupcakes. With the awful weather, I bet they’re still there. My husband even offered to go out and buy them. But no. I promised my child I’d bake for his class, so I’m baking.

Am I crazy?