Who do you feel is more judgey about your parenting -- your kids' grandparents or Pinterest? According to Susan Adcox, grandparenting expert for About.com, your parents and in-laws may actually be trying to free you from that 500-crafts-you-must-make-for-your-baby's-birthday-party ideal. Susan chatted with Catherine about the things grandparents want to tell their children — like enjoy life, eat healthy, put down the screens, stop spending money on meals out and cars, and more wisdom picked up through experience — but may stop themselves from saying because both parents and kids need to learn things on their own, and keeping the lines of communication open is sometimes more important than being right. For more on what your parents would like to tell you about your parenting, read "8 Things Grandparents Would Like to Say to Parents" on About.com Grandparenting; and for the article Catherine mentioned on dinner planning, read "5 Ways to Deal with Dinner Time (When You're Never Home at Dinner Time)" on About.com Family Fitness. Reading this somewhere without hyperlinks? Come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience. 

Catherine has two movies to talk about -- three if you count her homework for seeing Pitch Perfect 2 of watching Pitch Perfect. In addition to catching the new a capella comedy with a gaggle of 13-year-olds, she caught up with the much smaller but still entertaining Chef thanks to Netflix, and came away most impressed by its youngest star. Meanwhile, Terri spent the week watching very very short movies: the trailers created by networks to sell their new series. She gives thumbs up to this trailer for Supergirl (find the Glen Weldon post defending the show's rom-com-iness here), thumbs sideways to the one for Code Black, and thumbs down to Quantico, and in general figures that six or seven minutes is too long of a trailer for a sitcom and may be enough to un-sell her on a drama as well. What's looking good to you in the upcoming season? Give the comments here a try, or talk back on our Facebook page or @RoundAboutChat on Twitter. And if you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.

Are you ready for the summer? We're not so much ready for the summer as ready for the school year to END. In an early-morning podcast recording that had us saying "energy up!" on a regular basis, we talked about end-of-the-school-year field trips, end-of-the-school-year burnout, and end-of-the-school year exams upon exams that have Nicole ready for her daughter to graduate the University of Middle School. While we're light on actual constructive advice, do listen in to find out how to make it look like you didn't really sign all those lines of the reading log in one sitting.

Of course, once you have that glorious TGIthe-end-of-school moment, you have to figure out what to do with your kid during those structure-free months. We talked about camps both exciting (tall ships!) and not (typing camp!), the hopeful pursuit of a modest minimum-wage McJob, educational and sports programs for serious summertime progress, and the dreadful prospect of no structure when kids and parents must have it to function.

Finally, we shared our recommendations for the week: Catherine wants to keep you moving with her articles "How to Stop a Fitness Backslide" and "Have an Active Summer"; Amanda thinks you should look at that IEP (eek!) over the summer with her article "Reinforcing IEP Goals Over the Summer"; Nicole suggests checking www.summercamps.com for lots of fun summer camp options; and Terri commisserates with your end-of-year woes with "10 Things to Hate About the End of the School Year" and your routine-and-structure needs with "Camp Mom" and "DIY ESY."

Thanks as always to Jon Morin for producing our episode and Kristin Eredics for our happy in-and-out music. (If you're reading this description somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.)

Fresh off hosting 75 people for a four-year-old's birthday party with a theme of "Space, Ranbows, and Superheroes," Lexi Walters Wright chats with Terri about present protocols, color-coordinated superhero cupcakes, backyards vs. bowling alleys, how birthday parties have changed over the years, and why you won't find a pinata at her house. For more advice on birthday parties, read Lexi's articles on Understood.org:

+ 3 Reasons Kids May Struggle With Birthday Parties
+ 8 Ways to Make Your Young Child’s Party a Success
+ Common Party Pitfalls for Grade-Schoolers With Learning and Attention Issues

(If you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.)

Before TV networks started showing off their shiny new series to critics and advertisers at the upfronts this week, they cleared the decks of a whole lot of shows you may have hoped wouldn't get canceled. We started our chat with a different sort of canceled -- the kind where you get beheaded, as Anne Boleyn was at the end of this first season of Wolf Hall (500 year old spoiler alert!) -- and then took a brief spin past the Dancing With the Stars semifinals before landing in the TV show graveyard for a look at whether anything we cared about was lost in the carnage. (Wondering if your favorites still have a pulse? Mashable has a list of the dearly departed.) We also tipped a hat to shows that have survived in creative ways, by jumping to other content providers, getting a final year as a victory lap, or getting a gimmick (good luck with that all-live season, Undateable!) Are you mourning the dead, celebrating the living, or looking forward to something new? Share with us on Twitter at @RoundAboutChat, on our Facebook page, or on the comments here if you can get them to work. And if you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.

What promises would you make to your child if you had the opportunity to do so publicly, on Twitter, for everybody to see? That's the question asked by an Understood.org campaign, #ParentPromise, to inspire parents to demonstrate their devotion with a selfie and a commitment. Amanda promised to see the world through her children's eyes and put them before the laundry (literally, judging by her photo); Nicole promised to help her children survive and thrive, and earn college degrees they won't have to lease out later; Catherine promised to help her kids grow up to be their own persons, and to not complain too much about the cost of skating equipment; and Terri promised not to make big promises, but maybe some small easily achievable ones like "I promise to let you watch TV at least five hours a day."

From promises to keep, we moved on to promises we often see people break, like, "I promise to respond promptly when you send me an e-mail" and "I promise to leave a voice-mail message if I expect you to call me back." We discussed such digital dilemmas as accidentally replying-all, posting to the wrong Twitter feed, properly using social-media slang, and knowing when you can stop saying "Thank you" at the end of an e-mail conversation.

Finally, we gave our recommendations for the week: Catherine thinks you should get out and enjoy National Bike Month, Bike to Work Day, and the National Bike Challenge, which might score you the coveted prize of a year's supply of TP; Amanda has not yet read Emily Post’s Manners in a Digital World, but she thinks we should all look it over and compare notes; Nicole mentioned another online-comportment resource, Kindness Wins by Galit Breen, for parents who are new to social media and want their kids to behave; and Terri recommended her articles on putting together your own Camp Mom do-it-yourself day camp (in case your #ParentPromise was, "I promise to forget to enroll you in a summer program until school is almost out and every deadline has passed.")

Thanks as always to Jon Morin for producing our episode and Kristin Eredics for our happy in-and-out music. (If you're reading this description somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.)

Although embarrassing children has long been a specialty of parents, the addition of social media to the options for spreading stories about that thing your kid did has raised privacy issues and caused concern over the way parents of children with disabilities in particular portray their youngsters and to what purpose. Terri chatted with Robert Rummel-Hudson, author of Schuyler's Monster: A Father's Journey with His Wordless Daughter and blogger at Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords and Support for Special Needs, about the value of parents sharing their stories, the importance of balancing bad with good, the danger of pity parties, the hope of preparing a platform from which kids can launch their own adult advocacy, and the sneaking suspicion that a generation that's grown up online doesn't have the same conception of "privacy issues" that their pearl-clutching elders do. Listen in, and check back the first Thursday of every month for more conversations with Rob about raising kids with special needs.

Is the weather finally nice where you are? If you're looking for fun things to do outdoors with your kids, pediatric occupational therapist Meghan Corridan, who blogs at MAC&Toys, has some ideas for you. She and Catherine chat about simple and fun activities like riding a scooter, doing some gardening, drawing with sidewalk chalk, and blowing bubbles that are simple springtime pleasures and also provide lots of opportunities for motor planning, proprioception, fine- and gross-motor skill-building, attention focusing, sharing, problem-solving, and family fun. On the topic of wheeled conveyances, they both recommend the Razor RipRider 360, a three-wheel bike that both older kids and grown-ups will enjoy pedaling around. What are you doing outdoors with your kids these days? Share in the comments or by tweeting us at @RoundAboutChat, and if you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.

Mother's Day is almost here, and so it seemed like a good time to talk about mothers in books, movies, and TV, particularly since Catherine's latest book-club read is Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple. We chatted about that book and two others focusing on mother-daughter relationships, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan and Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtry, and then moved on to discuss moms in movies like Freaky Friday, The Parent Trap, and Almost Famous (see video clip for mom Frances McDormand putting the smackdown on rocker Billy Crudup), and TV shows including Mom, Brothers and Sisters, Parenthood, Modern Family, and My So-Called Life. Who are your favorite moms in pop culture? Share in the comments, tweet them to us at @RoundAboutChat, or talk back on our Facebook page. And if you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.

An e-mail about a campaign to get Cosmo treated like a porn magazine because its dicey sexual content is harmful to minors got us thinking about magazines in general, whether minors think of them as a bad-for-you delivery system when they can get cable TV for free, and how much attention we ourselves even pay to magazines anymore. We chatted about the relative dangers of sexual content vs. unrealistic expectations of beauty and body image; our own experiences with magazines' promises of coolness and perfect dried-flower arrangements; whether anybody understands what wrapping something in a brown paper wrapper even means anymore; and the way that a world in which entertainment can be delivered instantaneously and in greater quantity than we can possibly consume makes waiting for an issue of a magazine to be delivered seem impossibly quaint.

One of the things we used to depend on magazines for was telling us how to dress (even though Seventeen deeply betrayed young Terri's trust), and now we're more likely to turn to Twitter for interpretations of dress codes and occasion-appropriate attire -- as both Catherine and NPR's Linda Holmes recently did. We shared our preferred freelance uniforms, our exhaustion at the prospect of dressing up, our search for perfectly comfortable footwear, and our trust in Pinterest to provide guidance for women of our particular demographic.

Finally, we mentioned our recommendations for the week. Catherine pointed us to an article titled "What Training for the Boston Marathon Taught Me About Fashion, and Myself" for further thoughts on the meaningfulness of what we wear; Amanda told everyone to go online shopping for clothes that you don't have to go somewhere and try on in front of a nasty mirror (to which Terri added that the website Mode-sty will help you find things that won't show your underwear like you're a twentysomething Cosmo reader); Nicole gave us her Pinterest search formula; and Terri talked about a "podcast upfront" she attended featuring NPR podcast hosts and a lot of talk about the significance and future of podcasts, commentary on which you can find by looking up the #HearItUpfront hashtag on Twitter, where you may come upon this photo of the back of Terri's head and the green shirt she chose to wear).

Thanks as always to Jon Morin for producing our episode and Kristin Eredics for our happy in-and-out music. (If you're reading this description somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.)

Once you've committed to a particular way of parenting or educating your kids, can you admit to having struggles or making mistakes without inviting people to assume that your whole approach is wrong? Terri chatted with Kathy Ceceri, who writes about homeschooling on the All About Homeschooling Facebook page and her site Crafts for Learning, about the value of parents sharing their experience, the riskiness of setting yourself up as an expert, the difficulty of always putting a positive spin on things even though others might benefit from a more honest account, the way homeschoolers and free-range parents and people who are neither of those things feel judged by the other side, and the likelihood that those who try to see both sides will get judged by everybody. Enjoy today's conversation and look for chats with Kathy the last Wednesday of every month.

Our current favorite shows and some old favorites coming back from the dead were on our minds for this week's Round 2 chat. Catherine provided an update on Wolf Hall, and we talked about the pop-culture proliferation of the property with a book, a TV show, and a two-part play that got eight Tony nominations shortly before our chat. Terri gave a review of where Dancing With the Stars is at the moment, with a goodbye to young Willow Shields (doing her final age-appropriate dance in the video here) and the continued participation of Noah Galloway (who Terri is rooting for) and Chris Soules (who she is not.)

From there, we took a look at some TV shows from the '80s and '90s that are poised to return to our screens, including former Dancing With the Stars contestant Candace Cameron Bure reprising her role as DJ Tanner in the Full House sequel Fuller House. What does it say about the state of current TV that things like Boy Meets World, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Coach (Coach?!) are getting a second life (Terri mentioned Dan Feinberg's take, which you can read on Hitfix.com)? And what shows should be joining in the revival? We shared our thoughts, now you give us yours in the comments. And if you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.

An earlier podcast on schools grading parents led to this week's discussion of whether schools should even be grading students. Are grades a needlessly judgmental and limiting system for assessing student progress? Do we really need stiff standards and the teaching-to-the-test that goes with them? Is there some more free-form and holistic way to help young minds thrive? Or does every uplifting possibility have a downside? We talk about some of the options and variations, and dream of things that might work if there was unlimited time, money, and ability.

From grading students, we move on to grading those activities we involve our kids in to try to round them out, like figure skating and dance classes and marching band and social-skills group and guitar lessons. Which activities have we felt to be worth the trouble, and which do we regret? Sometimes, as it turns out, those are the same activity. We talked about such discouraging factors as cost, time, age-inappropriateness, and overabundance of bric-a-brac.

Finally, we made our recommendations for the week: Catherine mentioned two stories on her site relevant to the activities topic, "Youth Sports Leagues: Questions to Ask Before You Sign Up" and "The Best Kids' Sports Facility Ever"; Amanda had two on her site relative to the grading topic, "Checklist: Know Your Child’s Strengths" and "Recognizing Your Child’s Strengths and Weaknesses"; Nicole shared her new obsession with the app Periscope; and Terri invited everyone to check out the collection of quotes from these podcasts on Facebook and Pinterest, because we are a meme machine.

Thanks as always to Jon Morin for producing our episode and Kristin Eredics for our happy in-and-out music. (If you're reading this description somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.)

Most parents can use an extra set of hands from time to time, but when that assistance comes from our own parents, there may be strings attached. Catherine chatted with Susan Adcox, About.com's expert on grandparenting, about how grandparents should behave when they're stepping in to help out and how parents can graciously accept that help (and maybe a little advice). They talked about why grandma shouldn't monopolize the "good baby" time; the need to avoid disagreeing in front of the children; who gets the last word on behavior management and food issues; and the need for Grandma and Grandpa to overcome that urge to just fix things.

For more advice on the topic, read the following articles on Susan's site:

+ How Grandparents Can Help When a Grandchild Is Born
+ How Grandparents Can Help When a Parent Is Ill
+ Do Some Grandparents Have Problems With Boundaries?
+ How Grandparents Can Help Time-Poor Parents

If you're reading this recap somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.

Are you the kind of person who reads People Magazine to find out what the British royal family is up to? Catherine admits to such an interest, and quickly devoured The Royal We, a new book by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan of the blog Go Fug Yourself, which also has its fair share of royal-watching content, plus recaps of Wolf Hall, which Catherine watches for a look at royal life before there were paparazzi and the worst a royal had to worry about was ... well, losing her head, so maybe things were worse. Since Terri is not a royal-watcher, she had trouble coming up with some royal-themed entertainment to contribute to this week's theme, and made do with the royalty-adjacent 2003 film What a Girl Wants. She spoils the (happy) ending without ever really explaining what the movie's about, but if you're not familiar with it, you can learn everything you need to know from the trailer, including the fact that there is quite a lot of Colin Firth being adorable and/or soulful.

Share your own opinions of royal-related pop culture in the comments. And if you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.

An endless series on anxiety in children in Terri's local paper makes it clear that parents should worry more about worrying, so we thought we'd take stock of the anxiety levels in our own families to see if we're on-trend. We chatted about the many ways that anxiety can manifest, the hardiness of the worry gene that even gets passed down in adoptive families, the wisdom of blocking WebMD on your browser, and the parfait of anxiety we whip up when we worry about our children worrying about our worries.

In search of a little relief, we looked at the life-improvement advice our own mothers passed down to us. Among the recommended remedies: Go for a walk, drink more water, eat more alfafa sprouts, and preemptively worry about every bad thing that might happen so as to magically prevent it.

Finally, we passed on our own advice about what you should be checking out this week. Catherine recommended the book and CD Sitting Still Like a Frog: Mindfulness Exercises for Kids (and Their Parents) by Eline Snel as a serious anti-anxiety strategy and the song “Rub Some Bacon On It!" as a silly one (to which Terri added Ron Swanson's solution to dealing with disappointment); Amanda celebrated Understood.org's nomination for a Webby and asked us all to vote; Nicole suggested the book The Behavior Code Companion: Strategies, Tools, and Interventions for Supporting Students with Anxiety-Based or Oppositional Behaviors by Jessica Minahan for its help in identifying the many different ways anxiety may look in different children; and Terri gave a testimonial for The Anxiety Cure for Kids, a book with a cognitive behavioral therapy approach that helped her daughter slay the anxiety dragon, or at least shut him up a little.

Thanks as always to Jon Morin for producing our episode and Kristin Eredics for our happy in-and-out music. (If you're reading this description somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.)

Remember the story that was going around Facebook about a young athlete with special needs whose mom bought him a varsity letter jacket and whose school made him stop wearing it? Amanda had a chat with Charlie Zegers, who writes about sports and also about parenting kids on the autism spectrum, on whether buying a kid a letter to honor participation on a non-varsity team is something parents ought to be doing, however well-meaning and understandable such an effort may be. They talked about the meritocracy of sports, what a varsity letter signifies, how appropriating such a symbol may stir bad feelings along with good ones, and why there may also be unintended consequences to extending eligibility so that students in special education who get to high school a little older than their peers and stay longer can keep playing.

How do you feel about using a varsity letter as kind of an A for effort? Share your opinion in the comments, and if you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience. (And if you share Amanda's very basic level of sports understanding, listen to Garfunkel and Oates's "Sports Go Sports" right along with her.)

Congratulate Catherine! She finally made it through all seven seasons of 30 Rock—well after those who watched it on a weekly basis when it originally aired, but completely and enjoyably nonetheless. Her out-of-sync consumption of a pop-culture favorite led us into a discussion of other times we were not stepping in formation with our fellow consumers of culture, whether because we were missing something everybody else was raving about (bye, Mad Men!) or loving something that was otherwise apparently universally reviled (Terri is feeling you, Studio 60! ending of Lost! John from Cincinnati!) We talk about the three categories of rejecting mass adoration; roller-coaster shows that are all about the ride, not the ending; and our appreciation of having so many things to choose from that we can pick the quirky things we like.

What do you love that everyone hates and hate that everyone loves? Share in the comments, and if you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience. (And if you're now wanting to watch that John from Cincinnati motel speech Terri mentioned, you can watch it here on YouTube. And the scene with Cissy and the pistol. And the opening credits, the one part of the show that everybody seems to dig.)

A story about a school district that rated parents for their level of cooperativeness got us thinking where we'd fall on that 1 to 3 scale, and whether we'd feel bad if our kids' school gave us a U for "Ugh, it's That Mom" or wear it as a badge of honor. We discussed our various phases of accommodating and unaccommodating behavior, whether "cooperative" should really mean the same thing as "willing to do whatever school personnel want," and the importance of finding administrators who are willing to budge themselves out of their own uncooperative rut.

From schools rating parents, we turned to parents rating each other, as happens so often on the playground and the schoolyard. Using "the types of moms you see on the playground" articles from Cafe Mom and Huffington Post as our guidebook, we identified our own particular types, the types we steer clear from, and a few types we'd add to the list, including "Know-It-All Mom," "Playground Spy Mom," "Grouchy Mom," and "Nobody Wants to Talk to Her ‘Cause She’s a Pain Mom."

Finally, we shared our recommendations for the week: Catherine identified with an article on The Mid entitled "The 9 Circles of Youth Sports Hell"; Amanda mentioned an article she just wrote for Undertood.org, based on recent vacation experience, on "9 Tips for Taking Kids With Sensory Processing Issues to Theme Parks"; Nicole directed you to Meetup.com to find groups going on in your area (including, perhaps, a group of like-minded playground moms); and Terri invited you to take a quiz to determine your own level of advocacy orneriness and read some tips on starting your own playgroup and having a happy time at the playground.

Thanks as always to Jon Morin for producing our episode and Kristin Eredics for our happy in-and-out music. (If you're reading this description somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.)

Are superheroes good role models for little boys? And how much should moms worry about that? Amanda chatted with her Understood.org colleague Lexi Walters Wright about violent comic-book covers, mom-created vulnerable superheroes, and the rite of passage from obliviousness to obsession when it comes to the great wide world of superhero merchandising. What do you do when your child moves on from things like space and rainbows and brown — things you can understand and share — to a fascination with a huge and detailed universe you know nothing about? How do you convince him that Batman pajamas don't mean you can fly, dressing up like the Hulk doesn't mean you can hit your friend, and doing the dishes is superhero-worthy work? For more on the topic, follow these links mentioned in the podcast:

+ Marvel cancels two upcoming covers following uproar over new Spider-Woman
+ Violent 'Batgirl' cover pulled after Twitter uproar
+ Mom creates a coloring book to show son that superheroes CAN cry
+ PDF of the coloring book
+ Let Toys Be Toys

What's the superhero situation in your house? Share in the comments, and if you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.

Television giveth, and television taketh away. On this week's Round 2, Catherine talked about a new show she's trying out — Wolf Hall on PBS — and Terri talked about an old show she's saying goodbye to — Cougar Town on TBS — and we met in the middle for a discussion of how we decide to stick with a new show that maybe doesn't immediately suck us in. With Wolf Hall, there's a concern that there might be a little more work and homework involved in this story of Henry VIII than we're really looking for in this always-something-new-on-the-next-channel age. With Cougar Town, it was a case of so many people being turned off by the title and the quickly ditched premise of Courteney Cox dating young dudes that they never gave it a second or even a first chance, and never found out what a warm, goofy, endearing, and comfortable weekly visit with pals it turned out to be. 

What new TV are you tuning in to? Share in the comments, and if you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.

For this week's group chat, we thought we’d talk about some of the ways that adults are just suckin’ all the fun out of the Internet for kids. We started with a look at the way kids are using Twitter to cheat on standardized tests -- and not very smartly, as it turns out, 'cause the testing company caught them. We debated whether it's creepy for test-makers to be scoping out test-takers' online activities, and whether parents should be more concerned about that or the cheating. The need for parents to be doing some prety close surveillance themselves was clear from this and our second topic, which started with a look at the really horrible app Burnbook (read about it on Mashable and Cool Mom Tech) and the way parents invaded it with positive statements and guaranteed that kids would either be encouraged or flee the premises. From there, we talked about parents' general responsibility to police the Web for their kids, and for the kids of people who don't bother to do that; the risk of embarrassing your kid, or having your kid embarrass you; and the way even parents who are social-media savvy can get exhausted by it.

Finally, we shared our recommendations for the week: Catherine had some Easter party games to get your kid moving instead of overdosing on Peeps; Amanda and Nicole both suggested tech resources for parents—Common Sense Media and Tech Savvy Parenting, respectively; and Terri mentioned some new articles on her About.com site, including ones on watching what you say about school in front of your child, how to get a hold of school personnel when they're ducking your calls, and the difficulty of letting your kids make their own decisions.

Thanks as always to Jon Morin for producing our episode and Kristin Eredics for our happy in-and-out music. (If you're reading this description somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.)

Involving special-education students in IEP meetings is an important step along the road to self-advocacy, but one which parents may reasonably feel carries the risk of detonating a landmine. Terri chatted with Robert Rummel-Hudson, author of Schuyler's Monster: A Father's Journey with His Wordless Daughter and blogger at Fighting Monsters with Rubber Swords and Support for Special Needs, about that treacherous transition; how his daughter, Schuyler, now 15, is handling it; and how he's handling including her in an often hurtful and antagonistic process. We considered the power of a kid handing over an iPad with a question to be asked; our suspicions that the barrage of test scores that opens an IEP meeting is just there to break parents down; and how really lousy it must feel to sit in a room where people are saying things about you that you don't understand but that don't sound good. For more on IEP meetings, read Robert's recent blog post on IEPs and meet the players in Terri's IEP team article.

What's your IEP experience like? Add your opinion in the comments. And if you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, please come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.

Catherine and Terri overcame killer deadlines and risky audio problems (which drove Terri away from her microphone and onto the phone) to bring you our weekly entertainment-themed mini-podcast. We started with Catherine’s violent book-group pick, Karin Slaughter’s Criminal, which she wouldn’t have traumatized herself with if she’d had a choice but was interested to discuss with other readers. She mentions another group pick, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade, and the value of talking about books with other people with other life experiences, even if they do occasionally peer-pressure you into something icky. If there's not a book group available to you but you like the idea, Terri again recommends the book-and-a-movie discussion podcast Try It, You’ll Like it. (The latest episode is on the Jhumpa Lahiri novel The Namesake and Amanda's favorite '80s movie, Sixteen Candles.)

On the TV side, Terri chats about last night’s elimination on Dancing With the Stars, and the fact that it’s not just kids in the schoolyard and trolls online that bully; reality shows and institutions can bully quite well through misrepresentation and selective editing and outright mean talk and even just putting someone in a position to fail without appropriate support. Terri also checked in on the newest late-night host, James Corden of CBS’s Late Late Show, and had a favorable first impression, though she’ll likely be sleeping through it from now on. (You can watch the Tom Hanks clip Catherine mentioned on YouTube.)

Tell us about the pop culture you've been taking in this week in the comments, and if you're reading this somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.

Our group chat this week got off to a bit of a punchy start, with an exchange about the glamorous and cutthroat world of freelance writing and Terri's story of being taken to task on Twitter. Once we got past the laughter and awkward pauses to our topic, it was this: Would you use an app that directed you to restaurants that suited the needs of your quirky kid and family? The dad of a child with autism has a Kickstarter up to do just that, and we chatted about the relative value of online reviews (Catherine recommends a roundup of satirical reviews on Rage Against the Minivan for your review-dissing pleasure) and what things we'd really like to see rated and flagged (we'd pay good money to be warned away from establishments with self-flushing toilets, for example). We also thought back to last week's pre-emptive apology discussion in case we didn't get alerted to the presence of disapproving patrons.

Of course, the alternative to dining out is dining in, and it turns out we have problems with that, too; 75 percent of our podcasting crew hates cooking, which means that Amanda has to cook for everybody now. We discussed the stress of cooking with kids who are mostly interested in making a mess; of introducing new foods to picky eaters; of being tasked to bake dough that we don't understand; and of having a double oven when we don't even want to use one.

Our recommendations this week were also kitchen-related. Terri likes the cookbook A Man, a Can, a Plan; Amanda thinks we should all try the Fix-It and Forget-It cookbook; Catherine has articles on her site about easy dinners and easy breakfasts; and Nicole has a cheat for sneaking vegetables into your kid's food without actually having to, you know, handle vegetables.

Thanks as always to Jon Morin for producing our episode and Kristin Eredics for our happy in-and-out music. (If you're reading this description somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.)