By BETSY HART, Scripps Howard News Service

This weekend I was out doing errands for a few hours, and it turned out I forgot my cell phone. It was fantastic! My kids couldn't bug me every eight minutes with "Where are you, when are you coming home, and can you please get to the store for 'fill in the blank?' "

I sat in a school group parent meeting this week for one of my children's classes. I felt inadequate.

Or rather, I felt like maybe I should have felt inadequate.

The recent outrage over the super-skinny Ralph Lauren model caught my attention. You know, the model whose photo was altered in an ad so much that her waist was as skinny as her neck. And then she was fired.

Under health-care reform proposals, will abortions be paid for by health-insurance premiums or tax dollars?

That endgame isn't known yet. The betting looks good that it will.

How ironic that such a push in Washington comes at a time when Americans' views on abortion are shifting, and significantly, in the anti-abortion direction. Surprised?

Should we love our children unconditionally? Of course.

Can we do that and discipline them, too?

For many folks that answer is apparently "no."

When I was a kid, I used to color rocks and sell them door-to-door. I usually did pretty well with that. Sometimes I would concoct knickknacks with yarn and hawk those, too. And when it came to selling Girl Scout cookies, I was the champ three years running.

But a fundraiser for my school? Such a thing was unknown.

Recently on "The Dennis Miller Show," a radio caller argued that we need to tax the very rich even more. To paraphrase, Miller told him: Hey, I'm probably one of those guys. What more do you want from me?

Caller: I don't want anything from you.

Miller: Meet me at a cafe, bring your kids along and I'll hand over whatever money you want.

The ordeal of kidnapping victim Jaycee Lee Dugard almost couldn't have been more bizarre. Eighteen years after she was abducted, the 29-year-old California woman returned home.

It must have been an excruciating experience for Jaycee, as well as her parents.

And once again a high-profile kidnapping case has left parents on edge by playing to our worst fears.

I watched my three daughters sitting on our trampoline. It was late on a sunny afternoon the day before school started earlier this week. The girls, ages 13, 10 and 8, were simply talking. Endlessly -- about everything and about nothing, about feelings and dreams and about the end of summer.

I sat working in the yard at a distance and took it in and smiled.

And there she was in all her glory: GI Jane on the front page of this past Sunday's New York Times. An American soldier in Iraq, huge assault rifle in her arms, a woman on a mission.

Maybe it's because I have three young daughters that I shuddered.