Hi Celery,

Thanks for sharing this important piece of information. And thanks for your kind words on my recent post “Sparrow or Phoenix”. I like your saying to one other parent “You've got to get to used to the few who enjoy "splitting hairs" on petty issues, and picking out a few words or a sentence from one good article and make a big deal outside the main points. :)”, which get me prepared too as a newcomer to the forum.

I did a quick search on that website and found a couple of hundreds listed under NJ and even one just in my own town. I feel that it’s a tricky balance – On one hand, we don’t want to scare our kids showing them too much of the dark side of the world. One the other hand, we want them to be alert to avoid any harm that will stay with them for the rest of their life.

This brought me to recommend, "Little Children", a wonderful fiction book on suburban parents. One of the main characters is a sex offenders living in an uptight neighborhood. After reading half of the book, I felt really sorry and even some compassion for the poor guy, especially I read somewhere saying that many of them can’t control themselves since it’s something to do with unbalanced chemicals in their body system. But you know that one has to protect one’s children.

Read the reviews on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/????/obidos/ASIN/0312315732/qid=1118074109/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/103-4681371-1801442
Stop after the first reader's preview since the later ones reveal too much. It was a really good read for me
who hasn't read a fiction novel in years. I would love to know if any of you has read anything good and/or fun recently.

BTW, something fun related to the "downhill" relationship after getting married I heard on CarTalk, one of my favorite programs on NPR. The two guys do have insights on many things besides cars. It's about a lady who wrote a letter to a helpline on relationship:

Dear helpline,
Recently, I upgraded my boyfriend 5.3 package to
husband 1.0. Immediately after, I noticed significant
performance degradation in flower and chocolate
delivery department. In addition, without my
consensus, the husband 1.0 downloaded many sports
programs - NFL3.0, NBA4.1, etc. onto the home cable
system. Even worse, the house chore department has
been ignored ever since. Please help!
Ms. Desperate

Here is the reply from the helpline:

Dear Ms. Desperate:
Please note that the boyfriend 5.3 is an entertainment
package and the husband 1.0 is an operating system.
While you are frustrating and coping with the new
operating system, please do not try to download
another boyfriend 1.1 package or a mother-in-law 2.0
package since none of them is compatible with your new
operating system - they will surely crash your
operating system. Please also note that your new
husband 1.0 system has limited memory. So be gentle
when you are trying to improve its performance by
downloading other assistant software - do one at a
time, expect the worst and hope for the best. Hope it
will help.

Enjoy life!

ChiuLan