First of all, I have to tell you that the title of this article is a dirty lie. According to the unflattering evidence in my iPhoto folder, it was more like 79 attempts, but I'm not going to include every single derp-y picture here because I don't want your index finger to get a scrollcramp. Misleading titles aside, the point here is that I recently tried to get a lovely Mother's Day photo keepsake with my children, and JUST LIKE EVERY SINGLE YEAR, the results were comically terrible.

It wasn't surprising, really. My children have the attention span of Starbucks-infused fruit flies and they're constantly darting around in random directions like human Super Balls and the instant they spot a camera they lose the ability to form any sort of natural facial expression (my 7-year-old in particular).

Out of the mouths of babes ... come some pretty amazing words sometimes. Take this little boy from Brazil, for example. Luiz Antonio was just sitting in his high chair, getting ready to eat a plate of potato gnocchi, rice, and octopus -- when something suddenly occurred to him: "This octopus isn't real, right?"

Any parent who's ever attempted to feed a toddler some sort of meat has most likely witnessed the same milestone moment of truth. I remember my daughter squinting at her plate and saying, "Chicken! Like the chicken say 'bock, bock!'" (Except actually she said "kitchen" because she used to get "chicken" and "kitchen" mixed up, but that's beside the point.) When my daughter realized that chicken was chicken, she just sort of shrugged and kept eating. But not Luiz the future animal activist.

Kids singing are one of my weaknesses. I seriously melt when I hear their little voices belting (or squeaking) out a tune. So this video in which a 2-year-old boy belts out a Beatles tune while he and his dad play guitar has me simply smitten, and it will you too.

Together they sing one of the best versions of "Don't Let Me Down" I've ever heard. Seriously, Matchbox Twenty and Annie Lennox have nothing on this kid. Watch for yourself and see what I mean.

Ugh. An elementary school in Wisconsin is causing a stir this week all because of a "Gender Bender" themed dress-up day they had planned for the students during Spirit Week.

A cute little flyer was sent home with the kids detailing what the theme of attire would be for each day during Spirit Week. On Gender Bender day, the boys were supposed to dress like girls and the girls were supposed to dress like boys.

Sounds fun, huh? And it certainly sounds like something elementary school kids would get a kick out of.

There's just one problem -- some of the parents freaked out because they think dressing like a member of the opposite sex promotes homosexuality.

(I wrote some apologies to my kids four years ago -- I thought it was time for a followup.)

Riley,

I'm sorry I don't always have the patience to endure the near-constant barrage of pshew pshew pshew sound effects that come out of your noise-hole. I don't know what mental movie is playing so frequently in your active little brain, but I suspect it's directed by Michael Bay and gets a one-and-a-half-star rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I'm sorry if I sometimes fail to assemble my facial features into a properly stunned expression when you show me your latest Lego creation, and I'm sorry for that one time I deadpanned, "Boy, I can't WAIT to step on that thing in the dead of night" instead of marveling over your building skills, which are in fact quite impressive.

You know how sometimes you hear something that makes you shake your head so hard you wind up all dizzy? Yeah, that's how I felt after hearing about a mom who spends thousands on her 8-year-old son's wardrobe -- and is actually proud of it.

Vicky Antonia is so dead set on her son Zak being dressed to the nines that she admits shelling out over £20,000 on designer name clothes for him. (That's $35,000 a year. OMG.)

Want to know why? Because she apparently likes "dressing him like a doll."

(For reals.)

It's tough to stay calm in an emergency -- I know more than a few adults who have a hard time keeping a level head when things go haywire. So the way 5-year-old Nathaniel Dancy Jr. responded when his dad got violently ill behind the wheel is nothing short of amazing. Thirty-three-year-old Nathaniel Dancy Sr. was driving his son home from a shopping trip for school shoes when he suffered an aneurysm and stroke. Somehow, miraculously, Nathaniel Sr. managed to pull over -- but he couldn't speak or move. That's when Nathaniel Jr. took over, grabbing his dad's cellphone and calling his grandma, Susan Hardy-Blackman. As soon as Grandma heard that Nathaniel Jr. and his daddy were in trouble, she had one foot out the door (being a grandma and all), but there was one major problem: Nathaniel Jr. had no idea where he and his father were.

Next week, the Boy Scouts will hold their National Annual Meeting which, like most events of its kind, is an opportunity to put pressing issues on the table for discussion. And when they do, they’ll make a decision that weighs the future of the organization against the regulations of its past: whether or not to lift an existing ban on gay members. Boy Scouts is one in a thinning crowd of holdouts still practicing this brand of exclusionism. At least on paper, other entities have stepped up to support—or, at the bare minimum, tolerate—the LGBT community. If the Scouts’ powers that be move to accept gay boys, it probably will be less because of some great sweep of sensitivity and more due to public pressure and bias-shaming (because we don’t already have enough terms that have “shaming” tacked onto the end).