Before the ink could dry on New York magazine's cover story, "I Love My Children. I Hate My Life," the fevered responses have been all over the blogosphere.

Two of my favorite articles present two very different objections to the piece that claims that having children really ruins your life, except for those moments when your heart is so filled up it could burst.

I look at my son and think, How lucky. He doesn’t have to cook or clean or do the laundry. He doesn’t even have to wipe his own butt. But what makes him really lucky is his spongy, adaptable, forever-expanding brain that is ripe and ready for picking up foreign tongues. According to research from some very smart neurologists in London, brain images from bilingual children suggest that learning multiple languages increases the "grey matter" density in the brain. Therefore, toddlers that grow up bi- or multilingual gain cognitive advantages over their monolingual peers.For those of you wanting to raise a polyglot of your own, here are a few dos and don’ts from Christina Bosemark, founder of the Multilingual Children's Association, co-founder of the Scandinavian immersion school in San Francisco, and mother of two trilingual daughters.

Photo by Amy StorchTHE THRILLING CONCLUSION!

So, after getting all of your fabulous input and tips on creating a visual schedule, it ended up being way easier than I could have imagined. But only after I made it unnecessarily difficult. Because of course I did.

This morning my 15-month-old had his favorite breakfast -- Cheerios and a bagel. I tried to get a little yogurt into him, but since we had to bribe him with a bagel after a particularly frenzied morning, he wasn't having it.

His older sister eats her fair share of carbs too. Even though we put a balanced dinner in front of her, her reports from the school lunch usually include pasta, and not much else.

The Huffington Post has an article about kids who don't eat meat and fill up on starches instead of fruits and vegetables. The author called these unhealthy vegetarians by another name: Carb-etarians. Sounds just like my boy.

We have a beach towel that's got a colored map of the United States on it and my 2-year-old daughter has been learning the states that way. She can point out and name the states where she lives, and where her grandparents and cousins and many other of our friends live. But that's the extent of our geography lesson.

This toddler not only points out the states, but she does a little "smarty pants dance" afterwards.

So adorable.

Once in a while when my daughter does something she's really proud of, she'll say, "Yay!" or "I did it!" But that's the extent of her self-praise.

What does your toddler do when he's proud of himself? Does he have a smarty pants dance?

Image via Divine in the Daily/Flickr

Or, should I say five must-haves for my baby's first birthday, but perhaps you'll love these ideas, as well.

Now, a first birthday party can go one of two ways, and I fully support both: 1) a low-key family affair or 2) a huge bash that's solely for the mother and father to celebrate the fact they made it a year with their sanity in tact.

I chose option #2.

Most toddlers have a lovey they are attached to, maybe a blanket, or a stuffed animal. My daughter is still enamored of a brown stuffed bear she sleeps with every night, named, uncreatively enough, Bear (although sometimes he's a girl named Lily. And he takes karate class). Cute, huh? Well, her little brother, on the other hand, has formed an attachment to a car.

Not just any car, an easy-to-lose Matchbox-sized replica of Lightning McQueen (see it, ever so teensy, in the photo?). There's already been one panicked trip to Target to replace a lost one and several frantic bedtime searches. And as it turns out, we're not alone in scratching our heads at our child's attachment to a less-than-snuggly thing. After seeing the response to a posting on my Facebook feed asking for weird lovey stories, I found myself reassured my kid isn't all that goofy after all.

I got a really interesting topic suggestion on Facebook recently from a fellow special-needs mom (fistbump) about talking to our children about their diagnosis. "When do you tell your child about themselves?"

She'd come across a number of parents of special-needs teens and pre-teens who had never actually sat down with their children and talked to them about what they'd been diagnosed with, and what it all meant for them. It prompted her to sit down with her 4-year-old and attempt to explain (in a positive, age-appropriate way) some of the whys and whats and hows of his own journey of evaluations and therapy and what she's learned about his brain and how it works.