Working mothers are happier than stay-at-home mothers. At least that is what the latest study is telling us.

Working mothers, both part-time and full-time, suffer less depression than moms who are at home full-time. The study seemed to say that moms who work part-time have the best of both worlds since they have time for volunteering in school and time out in the world talking to other adults.

Yesterday, my son threw the French reader on the couch and said "I hate reading!"

Oh kid, I hear you. Those readers are so, so boring. They could make a librarian hate books. But that is reading in primary school which is dominated by acquiring skills not by enjoyment (this is worse in French Immersion but that is another topic).

I hope that once he gets up to speed in both languages that he will learn to love to read, just as his brother did. But then this study came out that says only half of students like to read for pleasure, which is approximately a 25 percent decline from 10 years ago.

My daughter told my mother she wants a dollhouse for Chrismukkah. This is the first I have heard of it. So now I am trying to figure out which dollhouse will make us both happy.

Why both of us? Well, gift-giving has turned into list-making and gate-keeping in our house. It's not because we have strict political rules like no plastic, and no commercially-themed items (okay, we are a little against completely commercial items).

Welcome to another edition of Flying With Your Kids. Today we will be tackling the topics of: nine hours without screens; drugs -- good or bad?; letting strangers manage your child; and the classic -- who cares what people think?

As a mom who flies abroad with three kids I am so happy that each seat has it's own TV screen complete with movies and TV shows. Remember flying in the old days? When there was only one TV screen for the cabin and if you were shorter than the chair in front of you, you couldn't see the screen. I am so glad those planes have ended up in storage. So, imagine my surprise when we walked on the plane for our flight to Barcelona last summer: a nine-hour flight to Barcelona? One of the old planes, no personal entertainment, and worse, no plugs to charge dead entertainment units.

Have you ever been on a momdate? Or even more scary, a blind momdate?

If you were lucky enough to have kids at the exact time as all you friends than you maybe have escaped the momdate. But for the rest of us who were on different timelines than our friends, or who moved or who just grew out of our circle -- the momdate may have been the lifeline we needed to a new, and important relationship.

The expectations on women are to be perfectly primped all the time from our grey roots down to our perfectly shiny toes. And since we as a culture have a hard time separating women from girls. Those expectations slide down on to girls as well.

We have come to hate the ragged cuticle, the unvarnished toe, the straggly eyebrow and any sight of pubic hair. So, we drag ourselves to manicures, estheticians and worst of all the waxer to get everything taken care of, in our quest for beauty.

Everywhere I turn I keep hearing about Elf on a Shelf. Parents in the schoolyard are talking about what a wonder it is, there are news reports about it increasing the magic of Christmas, and it is all over the Internet. And now there is even an animated TV show about it. There are even funny but not suitable for little children photos.

What is this new "family tradition" of The Elf on a Shelf? It is a wooden elf that comes complete with storybook. The Elf, so the story goes, has magical qualities; he watches the kids during the day and then goes back to report to Santa each night. The Elf is a playful little guy so he re-appears each morning in a different place [note to parents: you have to remember to move it nightly], to scare... I mean... observe... no, I mean delight the children each day.

Two Catholic schools have been struggling with what the female students have been sporting on their bottom half and it has hit the news cycle.

The Durham Catholic District School Board ruminated about banning the classic schoolgirl kilt after complaints of the girls rolling them up to show some leg. The Board debated it for a "few hours" before deciding to keep the skirt.

I'm far beyond the need to read baby name sites or search for baby names - and yet the top names of the year always interest me. I know there are a lot of baby naming geeks out there as well.

So with fanfare... here are the top names, according to Babycenter.com, for 2011. You can definitely see some of the celebrity influence in there.

A third-grader in Ohio was taken from his parents and placed in foster care recently because he weighed over 200 pounds.

The child has sleep apnea related to his weight and needs to use a machine at night to make sure that he is breathing properly.

His mother says that she loves him and is doing her best: “They are trying to make it seem like I am unfit, like I don’t love my child,” the boy’s mother said. “Of course I love him. Of course I want him to lose weight. It is very hard, but I am trying.