Rejoice! Old Man Winter must be on vacation in Florida. With temperatures hovering around 50 degrees and no end in sight, there is family fun to be had.  Take advantage of mild temperatures to get the kids out of the house.  1) THE ZOO IS STILL AWESOME The National Zoo is fantastic in the off season. There are fewer tourists, so visitors can enjoy short food lines and plenty of parking. Over the weekend, a small tribe of boys and I spent six hours tramping around, and were delighted to find many animals out and active. Animals that slump in the shade during our wretched summer heat were …

It’s cold outside. The kids are stuck in the house. Chances are that they are making you crazy. Please don’t kill them, no matter how tempting it may be. Yes, I know that your boys are bouncing off the walls, jumping off the couch to work off the adrenaline generated by killing XBox aliens. Your girls are snotty and short tempered, whining that you won’t drive them to the mall. It’s hard to beat the winter “bad behavior” blahs. The excitement of the holidays is over. Spring is a long way off. The days are short. The nights are cold. Everyone is grumpy and miserable. Thank heavens the Internet…

It's 2012, and a new year means new year’s resolutions. Blah. If you're over 30, I bet at least one of your resolutions is to look younger. If you're 15 to 25, your resolution (you’re so cool you only need one) is to continue being awesome. But if you’re still a kid, your new year’s resolution is probably to learn something. It may be something you want to learn–like becoming a better skater–or something your parents want you to know, like the multiplication tables or some crap about Shakespeare.   Making kids learn things they don't want to is an important part of parenting. There is an …

“Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go. I wanna be sedated.Nothin' to do and no where to go-o-oh. I wanna be sedated.Just get me to the airport put me on a plane.Hurry hurry hurry before I go insane.I can't control my fingers. I can't control my brain. Oh no – oh – oh – oh – oh” -The Ramones, "I Wanna Be Sedated" This song, while not exactly politically correct, may be the theme song for many a poor toddler brought onto airplanes during the holidays, or for their parents, or for the other passengers around them. Nowadays, most families have to go lot further than over the river and through …

My friends, when I was growing up, had the full regalia of tree and house decorations up by the first week of December. Not us. We never got a tree until Christmas Eve. About midday on Dec. 24, my father would announce that he was going to get the tree. Of course, we all wanted to go. Mom had to come as the poker-faced wingman. You see, my father got all worked up to this moment all year. Christmas tree buying was as close as you could get in the American suburbs to old-world style price haggling. We would pile into our wood-paneled station wagon and drive up the farm road near our house, on …

This column is not about Christmas. As far as I can tell, it is the only thing in America that is not. Christmas is everywhere, infecting me with catchy holiday jingles and making me want to buy stocking stuffers and burn pine scented candles. Humbug! To combat the Christmas spirit, this column deals with its exact opposite - dog poop. Yes, our area is so deep in dog bombs that Olde Saint Nick is probably going to step in one. I received the following letter recently, long after I wrote an open letter to dogs. Please read it in a heavy New Jersey accent for the most humorous effect.   Dear Ms…

Once upon a time, the day after Thanksgiving was just a day to recover from eating too much by walking around in department stores. We'd go shopping since we were already off work/school and there was extended family around to watch the kids. Over the past ten years, this concept of shopping a little on your day off has gone from a slightly busy mall experience to a dangerous, crazed, extreme sport with a name: Black Friday! Any naysayers who doubt the power of a well-planned marketing campaign just have to look around and see how potent it can be. If only we would use our powers for good …

With the economy being the way that it is, I have been hearing quite a few at-home moms saying that they need to find paying jobs. They fear, and I also acknowledge, the horrible trend in hiring practices where employers don't want to hire anyone with “gaps” in their work history and especially moms looking to get back into the work force. I am incensed and thoroughly pissed off about this, but it is a sad truth. But here is what I say to those hiring managers: You are missing out on a boatload of talent! Some people assume that being a good mother is equivalent to being a mushy pushover with…

Last week was a doozie. I had two writing assignments due, three volunteer commitments at my son’s school, and two doctor appointments I couldn’t miss (because there is nothing I would rather do than hang around a freezing exam room for an hour in one of those breezy hospital gowns, hoping someone would come and smash my breast between two ice cold pieces of glass.) Amid this hectic week, I moderated a panel discussion called “How Does She Do It? A Symposium for Working Moms” at the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Regional Services Center.   There were four mothers on the panel, all of them self-…

There seems to be a lot a buildup to Halloween. For weeks, my kids were making a lot of costume designs and charting out the most lucrative trick-or-treating path through the neighborhood. The county school system has also conveniently put a school closure, masquerading as a teacher work day, into their schedule to accommodate the very obvious distraction. This doesn't make it any easier on us poor parents, who now have to deal with the masses at home on a weekday—supposedly, still a working day for us. But this year, that day off of school was the actual day of Halloween on Monday, extending…

Halloween is almost upon us, and so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that I've spent the past few weeks sitting on the couch, chugging energy drinks and morosely flipping through the photos of Sexy Kittens and Bloody Ninjas in costume catalogs.  I have a bad case of Halloween inertia. There are costumes to be decided on, decorations to be set out, hayrides to be endured, pumpkins to be carved (oh, joy) and candy to be considered. But I just can't seem to motivate. Could we just outsource Halloween? I have nothing against the night itself. On Halloween I sit on the front porch, sipping …

I’m not afraid of Halloween. I don’t fear haunted houses, witches or ghouls. Ghosts, skeletons, severed hands, tombstones – bring them on. I’m not afraid of even genuinely scary stuff, such as paying $69.95 for a sparkly fairy princess outfit (crown and wings extra) that will be too small in six months. What frightens me about Halloween is the CANDY. Bags of chocolate, bowls of candy corn and handfuls of gummy worms may be bliss for kids, but they are enough to give most parents nutritional nightmares. Think about it. The average plastic Jack-o-Lantern holds about three pounds of candy – …

Editor's Note: Garine Isassi is a freelance writer, living in suburban Maryland. Since Patch's arrival in the DC area, she has been writing the popular weekly humor column, "Mom in the Middle" for NorthPotomac.Patch.com. In her perceptive, witty voice, she explores the meaning of life as a woman, a wife, and a mother in the suburbs, while being way too close to it to be objective. In my 20's, I lived in a hip town. I sang in a band. I had a job, took care of my business, and I was cute. For lack of more subtle words, mommy used to ROCK, man! I drove around in my first ever “new” car. It was a…

This week, we debut a new format for our popular weekly family column, "A Family Affair." The column will be written on a rotating basis by the "Family Affair" columnists for the Bethesda, North Potomac-Darnestown and Chevy Chase Patches. This week, the column is written by Maura Mahoney, a freelance journalist and mother of three who lives in the Town of Somerset in Chevy Chase. If you’ve lived in the area for any amount of time, you’ve seen them. They appear on your front porch or doorstep in early December—brown paper grocery bags with a neatly typed request for canned food stapled to one …