“One way I’ve started to organize the telling of my life story through media is by decade. Born in the mid-’60s, my earliest memories include hearing Fifth Dimension’s 1969 version of ‘Aquarius’ on the radio of my family’s faux wood-paneled station wagon. This kicked off a discussion with my kids about the flower power generation and the hippie culture.”

Please post comments and provide your own memories of meaningful media in your life.

Occasionally, we’ve had the question about why, in other families, the mom or the dad does not work. Here, again, the answer for us is that parents have all kinds of jobs to do to take care of a family, ranging from preparing meals to researching extra curricular classes. Lieber offers some excellent advice in general by suggesting that a parent ”say that no matter how much money each parent makes, both contribute equally to the household when all is said and done.”

How would you answer the question? What inquiries about money are your kids posing?

“I told you I have lice!” he cried into my wife’s phone while I tried to listen in from the driver’s seat.

“It’s dandruff,” my wife said, hopefully.

Sure enough, when we got home, we discovered one little bugger, then another, and another. Mostly, there were tiny eggs hiding in my son’s hair like ninjas waiting to pounce. Oh, crap, my wife and I thought. There goes the relaxing weekend. As we had learned two years ago, it was going to take an all-out defensive and offensive strike to rid out family members and home of these microscopic monsters. In addition to irritation, we also felt deflated and even a little resentful about having to go through this all again. It really is a hugely time-consuming endeavor to get life back to normal. And, as irrational as it is, we kept thinking about what we could have done to keep the lice away. In a family life already stuffed to the gills with tasks, this one put us over the top. Sometimes, there really is no perspective that helps…at least we’re not the family I just heard about that gets infested several times a year. Now that would really louse up our lives!

Thankfully, we had told our kids that this was likely to happen and they had said their goodbyes. The fact is that, while the kids liked her, the cat loathed being last in line for attention behind the boys. After our second child arrived, out of revenge, Sarah peed — many times - through our bedroom carpet all the way through to the wood baseboard before we figured out exactly what she was doing.

Still, I’m writing this blog to try to sort through the emotions of letting go of a cat who had been with us since my wife and I were in the second year of couplehood. I will miss her strange meow (like a pouting infant) and chubby tummy. It was time to release her. Rest in peace, Sarah.

Enter the Car Trunk Organizer and Cooler from RedEnvelope.com. As some of you may know from my columns, I am proud to drive a “Father Ship.” The ample trunk space is nice in my minivan, but it is a serious challenge to find anything amidst the piles of sports equipment, jackets, school papers, and more. So I wanted to try out this organizer, which promised to keep my car’s backside in order. The product is a rather sleek and classy looking thing, befitting a Jaguar more than an Odyssey, but it does look spiffy in black with the silver piping. Three easily washable main compartments flexibly hold a grocery bag in each one or any combination of the groceries, several baseball gloves, extra clothes, or even your laptop. The separate cooler has a sturdy handle to carry a small picnic or a passel of snacks. It can be slotted into one of the compartments or toted separately. Pockets on either side of the organizer can keep papers or paperbacks or sunscreen. I would’ve liked some kind of water bottle holders in case I only had a couple to stow in the organizer, but it can hold them upright if you prop other items against them in the cooler.

Fully expanded to its two-feet, the organizer won’t take much trunk space and influence the rest of your trunk to look neater. The whole thing can be velcroed down when you’re not using it, though you will likely want to keep it busy full-time. You can even take the whole organizer out with the reinforced handles to transfer it to another car or carry it out to the park if you’ve packed it with the day’s necessities.