Dear Mommy Poppins:

When I come home from work I want to play with my three year old son, but I just don't know what to do with him. I feel terrible about it, but, while I'm a project manager at work, I can't manage the simple act of finding something to do with my kid.

Signed, Feeling Played

Dear Played,

It can really be a blow to your self-image as an ГѓВјber-parent to be sitting there staring at your child and wondering what in the world you could actually stand to do together. Especially when they're little, the days can seem very long and playing Power Rangers can get old fast.

The JCC is celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King with performances by award-winning musicians, writers and dancers. Held at the Peter Norton Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th street. No advance registration; seating is limited. Doors open at 6 pm.

If you're a parent, you have too much stuff. It just goes with the territory. Toy passions come and go, but your apartment stays the same size. Time to purge. Face it, you're never going to make bread in that breadmaker; Tamagachis are so last year; and those horrible tapered jeans from the 80s--oh no, wait, those are back in.

Quality Time postings are dedicated to activities for spending time with your kids to make the most out of the limited, but amazing, time we have together.

The way I see, it there's basically two types of people: people who like opera and people who don't. One of those groups happens to be much, much, much, much, much larger than the other, but that's still how I like to break it down.

I don't care how cool and urban and hip a parent you are, facing the plain reality that you need to put dinner on the table for your family, one way or another, every night of the week until your kids go off to college could turn anyone into a slack-jawed, casserole-loving, Prairie Home Companion-listening, ketchup on the broccoli-allowing, Rachel Ray wanna-bee.

It's the conversation we hear the most around the proverbial water cooler, in the literal school yard, and it comes up everyday on the other-worldly message boards. It's unavoidable, inescapable, it's the dark secret we all harbor as we're out with our Bugaboos and Jimmy Choos looking above-it-all...at some point we have to go home and feed our children.

Anybody can cook a meal and we've all succumbed to take-out occasionally, but, every night for the rest of our kids' childhoods is a lot of tacos! So what's the answer? Well, sometimes being really cool and above it all means you are able to do something dorky and take it in stride. That's where I think menu planners fall. Menu planners are website services which will email you a week's worth of meals with grocery lists so that you can spend less time fretting over decisions like mac and cheese or beef stroganoff and more time, well, doing something better than that.