Every year around Halloween I get a longing to watch the spooky television specials I saw as a kid. It's no wonder -- the old Christmas specials like Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer have been playing since the '60s. But where are Garfield's Halloween special, the one with Donald Duck and the witch, or the cartoon version of Ichabod Crane? Several years ago I set out to find and watch these again. And I couldn't help but notice...these are terrifying for children. Why was I ever allowed to watch them? As far as the Legend of Sleepy Hollow goes, well, the gist is enough to scare the bejeezus out of a child. A legendary man without a head, riding a horse, brandishing a sword, chasing an innocent (slightly dorky) schoolmaster out of town. So let's just put aside the appropriateness of beer drinking at the old Snooker and Schnapps Shoppe, the love triangle, and the fact that Ichabod spends his school time daydreaming about his lady's bountiful wealth. "Katrina...

Sometimes you don't know the right move, but you damn sure know the wrong one. I had to pull my 4-year-old out of a preschool that he loved due to reasons he doesn't know and would not understand. He's going to dearly miss his best friend, an extrovert who has helped draw him out of his shell. He's going to be discomforted by a new environment, new people, new routines, new rules. But I can't leave him in a situation created by adults who, I really believe, refused to work with this child's best interests at heart. There is no manual or how-to guide for making the right choices for your one beautiful, unique, loved child. Every choice has repercussions -- good and bad. Some I can see right now, some I won't be able to see for years. It's terrifying and enormous that what I do today will reverberate within him for the rest of his life. If I deliberate too long, I'm paralyzed. So many what-ifs. So many could-be's. Not atypical. Buds just ha...