If you've had any personal experience getting a child registered for kindergarten lately, I've got a question for you: did you have to hand over, say, a DNA sample to the school? A photograph of your underwear drawer? A printout of your browser history, maybe?

The reason I ask is because I was a little dismayed at the sheer amount of personal information I had to provide when I registered my 5-year-old a few weeks ago. Based on this post in the CafeMom forums, I'm not alone in feeling like the number of questions a person's supposed to answer about their kindergartener has become a little ... extreme.

In what has to be one of the saddest yet sweetest gestures I've ever seen, hundreds of police officers showed up to a 5-year-old girl's kindergarten graduation to support her after losing her dad in the line of duty just three days earlier.

Originally, a few officers were planning on attending Tatum Raetz's graduation ceremony, but then word spread through the Phoenix police department. Lo and behold, Tatum and her mother were greeted by hundreds of men in uniform who helped honor her daddy's memory.

If you have kids then you know that a good, reliable babysitter is really hard to find. Like holy grail kind of hard.

And with no family around, we depend on our babysitter!

But when you live in a neighborhood with tons of kids, it's inevitable that another parent will see your awesome sitter and want to use her (or him) too, which hey, I'm all for sharing. But I've seen sitters get stolen left and right. Talk about uncool.

So here are my tips for making sure your babysitter doesn't think about moving on.

Sigh. I know all schools have a set of rules that have to be enforced and are expected to be followed -- but after hearing about a kindergartner who was put in detention all because her parents dropped her off late at school, I seriously want to scream.

When 6-year-old Brooke Loeffler arrived her school, Olympia Elementary in San Antonio, late for a third time, she was punished by being sent to detention -- something the school district insists her parents signed off on.

Have you heard about the kindergartner who is being banned from her class because she can't get a chicken pox vaccine? Yep, 5-year-old FrankieElizabeth Staiti was kicked out of her Staten Island elementary school because she hasn't been been vaccinated against it -- and the department of education refuses to allow her to return until she has.

But let me repeat -- FrankieElizabeth can't get the chicken pox vaccine, because there's a chance that doing so could be detrimental to the health of her newborn baby sister.

You see, the doctor is actually refusing to vaccinate FrankieElizabeth, because the baby could have a possibly fatal allergic reaction if she comes into contact with her sister after she's had the vaccine.

It seems like whenever we read about teachers, it's because they're doing something like having sex with their students or binding them with duct tape. If you got your impression of teachers only from the news, you would never send your kids to school. Occasionally, we hear some good, but usually only when it's something extraordinary -- like the teachers who died with and protected their students inside Sandy Hook elementary.

Like most of us who went through 12 years of primary school, I never saw any of these types of things. I saw good and I saw not-so-good -- but I never saw jaw-droppingly extraordinary or Earth-shatteringly horrific. Most teachers are just regular people who happen to want to teach your kids -- and who happen to be forming who they will become as adults. They deserve our respect, and yet they get so little of it that they're quitting the profession in droves.

Here are eight things I'd like to thank my teachers for.

At some point, many moms will have to broach the subject of eating disorders with their daughters. With so much pressure to be thin, our girls sometimes go to unhealthy lengths to fit that model-like ideal. It's just an awful fact of adolescence -- or so I thought. Turns out, the issue is affecting a younger and younger group. Doctors report that anorexia is being diagnosed in girls as early as kindergarten. Absolutely frightening.

Like many parents, I had a nearly overwhelming desire to go pick my child up from school last Friday. As the news of the horrific events in Newtown kept unfolding and the incomprehensible scope of the massacre became more clear, I kept thinking about how my son was -- right at that very moment -- sitting in a first-grade classroom much like the one in Sandy Hook.

The reason I didn't jump in my car and go grab my child from his school is because I thought ahead to the discussion we would have about the shootings. What sort of message would it send, I wondered, if I tried to reassure him his school was safe -- after I had arrived in a teary panic to take him home?

As it turns out, he hasn't shown any signs of worry that what happened in Newtown could happen where we live. It's partially because he's a young boy who can't fully comprehend this terrible tragedy, but it's also because he believes a lie … one that I'm happy to support.