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.

I guess all the sex on nerve.com has led to the obvious repercussion (you think of all people they would have known better), because Nerve just has spawned a parenting site, babble.com.

MommyPoppins.com is the New York guide that treats living in NYC with kids as an incredible adventure; digging up all the incredible things NYC has to offer for babies, toddlers, children and families, uncovering activities, resources, services, schools, parks, places, and culture. Mommy Poppins covers everything parents need to know to get the most out of NYC with kids, with an emphasis on keeping it all affordable.

Living in New York is a great adventure. Living here with kids is like going to Great Adventure--it could be lots of fun or it could be endless hassles and getting puked on. We're going to be talking about the whole roller coaster of life in the city with kids. From the big questions like schools to the little questions like what to do this weekend. Think of Mommy Poppins as a spoonful of sugar to help the Paxil go down.