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Having a child changes your life. For Karen Higano, giving birth to her son, Connor, actually helped saved her life.

Five years ago, 39-year-old Higano had been in labor for 33 hours when her doctor recommended a Caesarian section. During the surgery, her obstetrician discovered four cysts on her left Fallopian tube. He thought nothing unusual, but removed the cysts and sent them to pathology to be on the safe side.

On the day she left the hospital with her newborn, Higano was hit with the news: ovarian cancer. “When I was diagnosed, I was shocked,” she said. “I knew about breast cancer because my mom was a survivor, but I really had never heard of ovarian cancer.”

With cooler weather around the corner, many moms begin thinking of cute fall clothes. However, our kids’ needs come first, leaving little left over for us to update our wardrobes.

So until daycare is free and groceries cost a smile, I needed to figure out how to freshen up my working mom’s attire without breaking out the credit card.

I could be like Marisa from New Dress a Day who uncovers $1 finds at thrift stores and transforms them into runway-worthy designs. But my sewing skills are nil. Really – I make my husband sew on buttons and hem pants.

Or, I could try the Six Items or Less plan, living off six pieces of clothing for one month. But that would necessitate doing laundry more than once a week.

To curb my dilemma, I turned to two St. Louis experts to help me on my quest for cuteness. With their advice and a little extra work on my part, I’m headed on the right track to an affordable wardrobe rework.

Farewell, flip flops. Sayonara, sandals. Ciao, crocs. My son’s elementary school has a policy against all of them, along with any other footwear that gets in the way of running and playing. I used to think such policies were harsh, back in the days when my 7-year-old was first in preschool. Now that I’m older and wiser (and have seen the scientific studies to support the bans) I see where they’re coming from.

When we were little, we’d listen to our parents and grandparents share how they “walked five miles to school in the snow and pouring rain." Today, our kids are shocked when they hear we walked three blocks to school every morning.

Whether school is too far from home in our ever-expanding suburbs, their parents are afraid of them heading to school on their own or, let’s face it, they just don’t want to, kids these days rarely walk or bike to school. However, 10 to 20 minutes of exercise twice a day can have a significant effect on a child’s well-being. According to the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research , middle-school girls can get an additional 13.7 minutes of exercise a day simply by walking to school.

Thankfully, Trailnet, the St. Louis nonprofit which promotes active living, has come to the rescue once again this school year through its participation in the Safe Routes to School national program.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine mentioned her daughter’s daycare offered yoga lessons. Knowing I’ve done yoga for years, she asked me if I ever considered yoga for my 4-year-old.

Most of the parenting how-to books I read focus on the preschool and early elementary ages, but occasionally, to find out what I’ve gotten myself in for, I pick up something about older kids. Getting to Calm: Cool-headed Strategies for Parenting Tweens and Teens sounds like one I’ll definitely want to read. 

I heard about it in an NPR segment that also contained a lot of fascinating science about how tweens’ and teens’ brains are rewiring themselves. The tremendous growth in brain cells and neurotransmitters of early childhood tapers off, and in adolescents the numbers are getting smaller. Yes, their brains are shrinking – sort of. They’re also becoming much better at integrating information from multiple sources and thinking deeply about a topic. A third change is that the parts of the brain that recognize emotions mature more quickly than the parts that regulate emotions.

You can see how all of this is a recipe for trouble.

So we got home from vacation today, and I had to face up to the fact that I’m going to have to retrain my kids from a diet of Powerade and Fruit Loops back to milk and actual fruit.

Daunting. But I picked up some great tips during a phone conversation last week with Melissa Halas-Liang, a California-based nutrition coach and founder of SuperKids Nutrition. We started corresponding a few months ago about the impact health advocates are having on TV food advertising aimed at kids. In our call, she was pretty blunt in her assessment: “Obviously it’s not making a difference.”

So we spoke instead about three main problems when it comes to overweight kids: 1) the wrong food choices, 2) outside influences (like those ads), and 3) lack of exercise.

Just hearing that made me feel better, because despite our crappy diet during the past 10 days, we burned off way more calories than usual at the beach, the mini-golf course, the German cultural festival where the boys danced and in swimming pools at our hotels. The boys barely had time to watch TV or absorb any junk food ads other than the occasional billboard as we drove.

My task is really to address the first problem on the list. Halas-Liang gave me five good ways to do that.

In just a few weeks, my 4-year-old’s preschool starts once again. As her excitement runs wild, my anxiety is jogging right alongside it.

Between work schedules, daycare, preschool, soccer, tumbling, family events and, on a very rare occasion, a social life, our home turns upside down the day school starts. Trying to stay on top of everything can be overwhelming for any parent, so instead of burying my stress under a king-sized Kit-Kat, I turned to two experts to help solve my most pressing organization dilemmas.