A friend told me that her husband volunteered in a Junior Kindgergarten class and some of the kids didn't know how to feed themselves.

Isn't that sad? For the kids and their caregivers, who have spent hours spooning food into their mouths? It isn't just sad, but it is bad for the kids - it is even bad for babies.

Does the phrase "boomerang lunch" mean anything to you?

If it does, I know that you can feel my pain. Our school has always had a no garbage policy, but now they have formalized it by calling it a "boomerang lunch" with posters and catchphrases. This means that everything that gets sent to school in the lunch bag comes home - including the garbage. There are no garbage bins available in the makeshift lunchroom -- not even for compost.

Fat makes us uncomfortable; it also makes us unhealthy. Which is exactly what the Children's Healthcare of Atlanta is hoping will come across with their new Strong4Life campaign that make the viewer look into the face of an obese kid with the tagline: "It is hard to be a little girl, when you aren't one."

But is it going to far? Is shame and humiliation the thing that is needed to get healthy food on the table and kids off the couch?

Tonight is the first night of Chanukah. And as I write this, I am freaked out a little bit because I thought it was tomorrow night. Because my calendar says tomorrow, but I should know that Jewish holidays always start the night before, on the eve. Luckily, I have eight days to get caught up.

I know what you are thinking: eight days?

When people find out that we celebrate Chanukah, after they get over the first awkward Happy Chanukah statement, they always want to know a few things. Like:

France has made a unilateral move to ban ketchup in school cafeterias except when served with - wait for it - French fries.

Bruno Le Maire, the agriculture and food minister said the move was a way to instill a love of traditional French recipes into France's new generation:  "France must be an example to the world in the quality of its food, starting with its children."

I have just returned from volunteering with Scientist in the Schools, in my son's grade three classroom.

I'm not sure that one day a term is really a way to make kids excited about science, though the leader assured me that as long  as the teacher continues with the themes, the kids learn scientific concepts throughout the term.

Well, that's a big if in a French Immersion classroom with a lot of kids, chaos, and other curriculum necessities on the list. I'm not so sure that kids are learning too much science in elementary schools. So science concepts sort of all into the we do at home bag. One thing that a primary teacher once told me is that the kids who bake with their parents regularly are farther ahead in math and science when they arrive at primary school.

I have packed three lunches and I have about 3 million more to go. You?

The joy of the first day of school was definitely tempered with people's aggravation about packing lunch. 'What's the issue?' asked a few grade school first-timers as their kids walked confidently into school proudly carrying their beautiful new lunchbags. 'You will see' was the time-worn answer by us, cynical moms.

If I really wanted to mess my kids up I would self-publish some books and leave them lying around the house. One of them would be called "Maggie Goes On a Diet and Becomes Popular", another might be "How To Look Like Barbie" and "How to Exercise to the Point Of Exhaustion So You Can Have a Killer Butt Before The Age of 12".

Luckily, the first one about Maggie going on a diet is ready to hit the store shelves so I don't have do a mock-up of it. You can see the cover here, with a poor chunky Maggie staring wistfully into a mirror holding a too-small pink dress. Poor Maggie.

I think we are all suffering from nut allergy fatigue.

I know I am and I don't even have a kid with a nut allergy. I can't even imagine how a parent of a child with allergies must feel - always asking, monitoring, hovering over every bite. My guess is fatigue doesn't even cover it.

A study recently came out that said parents of kids with allergies have to deal with a lot of bad behaviour from the general public who think that peanut allergies are "frivolous" and a "fad". The study even said that some kids have been given nuts by other family members just to test to see if the allergy was real.

The last thing I want to think about during the dog days of summer is packing school lunches; not having to pack school lunches is one of the best parts of summer.

But a study came out this week that has all of us talking and thinking about the terrible topic. Researchers tested 705 school lunches and almost 98 percent of them were not at a safe eating temperature. They were so warm they could breed harmful bacteria and make kids sick.

Even the lunches packed with ice packs were warm enough to cause some stomach problems. That's great. Not only do I have to dread packing lunch, but I also have to worry about its safety?