By BETSY HART, Scripps Howard News Service

I have seen the future -- or, rather, the past?
And it is Facebook.
For those folks my age who might not know this, the social networking site is now, as a dear friend put it, the new social spot for the AARP set.
Talk about your past catching up with you.

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes ... a lot of problems when you have kids?

Ah, if only those poor women had followed my mother's advice. How much better off they would be.

Sure I'm buying "two for one" eggs in the grocery store and ignoring my retirement statements like everyone else in this crummy economy. But I'm also marveling at the benefits -- yes benefits -- of a serious recession.
Like, well, "two for one" deals on eggs and a host of other things in the grocery store.

There are three distinct advantages to having four children. Believe me, I am always hoping to find more.

"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore. . . " so goes the classic Dean Martin song.
But, when the dopamine hits the brain? Well apparently that's when things really get crazy.
As Neely Tucker wrote in the Washington Post (2006) about new research showing love to be a chemical reaction,

How often do we hear the word "teens," and think about the marriage of their parents? Pretty rarely.
But Dr. Paul Randloph of Insight Christian Counseling makes that connection all the time because he consistently sees in his practice marriages in crises during their children's teenage years, or breaking up shortly after.

I recently had a friend and mom of teens tell me that she and her husband were experiencing some of the most difficult years of their married life, largely she felt, as a result of parenting teens.
"Whatever the stresses of little ones," she said, "that was easy compared to what teens can do to you!" She was exasperated.

My children's school will soon host the annual "variety show." An infinitely better name for the program than the more common "talent show," since most of the kids participating are not displaying any real "talent," and so what? They are having fun putting on various acts and that's as it should be.

Here we go again: The pharmaceutical maker Merck is seeking approval from the FDA for boys as young as 9 to get the Gardasil vaccine, which prevents some strains of the Human Papilloma Virus (or HPV), a virus spread during sex which, in turn, can cause cervical cancer in women.
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