By BETSY HART, Scripps Howard News Service

How well I remember a dear Roman Catholic friend of mine saying to me, "you evangelicals are so caught up in your 'personal relationship with Christ' that sometimes you forget it's not all about you!"

News out this week shows that this year, the average age of first marriages rose again, to 28 and 26 for men and women respectively, up from 27 and 25 just last year. What's going on?

I remember when Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976. My parents were not big Gerald Ford supporters. They were fans of Ronald Reagan (as I was too. I was a junior high school nerd. Different column). My parents were very politically active then, and that was a heartbreaking election for them and even me.

There is a distinctive smell from the full candy buckets at the end of Halloween night. Even in a bag of mixed bought candy that smell doesn't seem to come through. One gets it only at Halloween when one breaths deep of the sickly sweet mixture the kids have in those buckets and bags.So I can't wait for Friday night.

When my youngest, Olivia, was 4, I was gone for a several days for work. Wonderful "aunt" Paula, a dear friend of my mother's and known to my kids to be a loving pushover, came to stay with the children. After the older kids had all left for school one morning, Olivia excitedly informed aunt Paula that that very day was her birthday. Naturally, Paula flew into action.

When I was growing up, my mother had the habit of always using a tea bag twice. Always.

Do you know how many advertising images our children are bombarded with every day?Drum roll please, and I'm not making this up -- somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000. That's according to findings from the folks at the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding (CPYU.org) in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.

I just received a phone call from a representative of a national chain of childcare centers. Would I be interested in having on my radio show one of their top people who would talk about the value of the chain's new initiative in teaching Mandarin Chinese (as in, the language) to preschoolers?

A baby coordinator? I first heard the term and was baffled. Is that someone who organizes babies according to height and weight, or maybe zip code? Well, not exactly.

I received in my e-mail box today a press release from a "women's'' organization called Moms Rising that supposedly represents "83 million moms in America." "These moms have unanswered questions for the Alaska Governor about her positions on the everyday issues that most mothers face, such as access to healthcare, fair pay, paid family and medical leave, after-sc