While your nightstand may be overflowing with books about pregnancy and birth, you may want to add a baby sleep book to that stack, too. Getting the sleep facts of life before your baby arrives on the scene can help you to be a more rested new parent. Here’s a quick guide to get you started.

Top Seven Strategies for Preventing Baby Sleep Problems

1. Try to get your newborn to bed when he is sleepy but not overtired.
2. Use the power of daylight to reset your newborn’s sleep-wake clock.
3. Provide your newborn with a sleep environment that is sleep enhancing, not sleep inhibiting. Make sure your newborn’s sleep environment is safe, too.
4. Start thinking about how you’re gradually going to teach your baby self-soothing skills. (You want to start teaching your baby these skills by the time he is three- to four-months of age—the time when babies are capable of learning about sleep associations.)
5. Think about how you’re going to ease your newborn into a more regular sleep and nap schedule. (Pay attention to his evolving sleep-wake rhythms and you’ll start to see patterns start to emerge.)
6. Avoid highly stimulating forms of activity right before bedtime or your newborn may be too wound up to go to sleep.
7. Don’t forget to practice good sleep habits (don’t overdo it with the caffeine or the alcohol, particularly close to bedtime; and make sure you’re getting enough physical activity to be physically tired at the end of the day) and make sleep a priority for yourself, too.

We are going to talk about a very important topic. A topic that is also highly debatable: natural talents.

To help you shed some light and remove any confusion you have on this topic, we have a very special guest in this exclusive interview.

He is none other than Anthony A. Spadafore. Anthony is the Director of Pathfinders, a Senior Career Coach, author, and career columnist. The Alexandria, VA based coach has helped countless people to identify their natural talents and learn what careers fit them best.

Note that this interview is long and detailed (A big thank you to Anthony for his effort). If you're in a hurry, we have highlighted main points of this interview in BOLD for easy browsing.

However, we advice you to read it in full as Anthony shares some very interesting personal stories that you can learn from.

Enjoy the interview!

The market is flooded with toys for our children.

As a parent, it can be hard to decide which toys are the best ones to buy for them. Of course we want to get them the items they are excited about, but we also want to provide them with safe toys that they can learn from. It is important that your child has age appropriate toys.

Safety is a key concern when it comes to younger children and some toys that are out there. Always check for recalls on the toys you purchase for your children as well.

“I don’t want to go to library.”

That was the reply I received when I asked my daughter about our plan to a local library.

I was shocked to hear the answer as J was totally enjoying herself in the last trip.

As a natural response, after getting such an unexpected reply from her, I was planning to give her a list of 101 reasons why libraries were good and she should change her mind.

Fortunately, I didn’t. Instead, I probed further.

A 3-year-old girl found alive in the upside-down wreckage of an airplane survived because she was strapped in a car seat, rescuers said. They said they knew she was OK when she cried for her teddy bear.

Sunday's crash killed Kate Williams' pilot-grandfather, Allen D. Williams, 65, and another passenger, authorities said.

The plane was found nose down and flipped over in the icy water at the edge of a riverbank in the rugged mountains of southeast British Columbia.

''What saved her life was being strapped into that car seat,'' said Mike Plonka, a member of Golden's search-and-rescue team. ''You could see that she was very scared. Her big concern at the time was her little teddy bear. She didn't want to leave without it. ...

''She was just pointing at it and calling it 'Baby,''' he said Monday.

Full report: Toddler found alive in plane wreckage

Sleeping pills advertised for children, dangerous toys and bottled water taken from local reservoirs are among the world's worst products, a global consumer group said Monday.

In announcing its bad products awards for 2007, Consumers International said the top prize went to the US subsidiary of Japanese firm Takeda Pharmaceuticals for promoting a sleeping drug for children.

The company ran a television advertisement in the United States which used images of children, chalk boards and a school bus to sell its drug Rozerem.

The "back-to-school" advertisements, which complied with US law, promoted the sleeping pills to parents without including health warnings for children, Consumers International said.

"This case demonstrates the lengths to which some drug companies will go to increase sales of their products, how direct to consumer advertising can promote irrational drug use, and how weak regulation can foster irresponsible corporate behavior," the group said.

Full report: Sleeping pills for kids top global list of bad products

You have planned to have a family for a long time.  You meticulously picked out the bedroom décor, the toys, and the books to read on development and labor.  Now your baby is here and growing up fast!  But you never knew it would be this difficult.  Your baby doesn’t eat like “all the books” say they will.  Your baby doesn’t act like what the books say.  How do you know what to do?

He's played everything from a Wall Street vulture to the president, but these days Michael Douglas is focusing on his favorite role — father and husband.

"I've learned to kick back and be a family man," he says. "Since I married Catherine (Zeta-Jones), we've been raising a new family. I'm enjoying it immensely. And my priorities have changed enormously."

Since getting married in 2000, the two have had a son and daughter.

Douglas was in Savannah to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Savannah Film Festival.

Full report: Michael Douglas' New Role: Family Man

Some 1 million foam baby seats sold by Target Corp, Wal-Mart Stores Inc and other large retailers are being recalled because of reports of young children falling out of the seats, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said on Thursday.

The safety agency said it received 28 reports of young children falling out of the seats, including three who suffered skull fractures because the seats had been placed atop tables.

The baby seats, made by Bumbo International of South Africa, sold for about $40 each from August 2003 through October 2007. Retailers that sold the product also included Sears Holdings, Kmart, Toys "R" Us, USA Babies, it said.

The round Bumbo Baby Sitter Seats are 15 inches in diameter and made of molded polyurethane foam that wraps around a child.

Consumers should contact Bumbo to obtain new warning label stickers and instructions for the recalled baby seats and should never use the infant seat on a table, countertop, chair or other elevated surface, the agency said.

Full report: Baby seats recalled due to head injuries

Other recalls: Baby Seats, Metal Jewelry, Diego Boats, Halloween Pails, Bobble Heads, Cake Decorations

If your school-aged child expresses an interest in learning to cook, you’ll want to nurture that interest along.  Here are some tips on getting them started in the kitchen:

• Make sure that you have a kid-friendly work area.  If the counter is too high for them to work at comfortably, consider having them work at the kitchen table instead.

• Plan to be on hand to supervise and to lend a hand when needed.  Cooking is a skill that requires time to master.  Besides, the kitchen is one of the most dangerous spots in the house, so you don't want to leave the budding chefs in your family on their own while they're cooking up a storm.

Time is a rare commodity for today’s parents.

Most parents leave the house early in the morning and only come home with a tired body late at night – leaving no time for kids. Ironically, kids want nothing but time from parents. Time to play and time to connect.

Is it too much to ask for for a kid?

Are you one of the parents who find no time for kids? Then you should stop and ask yourself this question:

What am I busy for? Am I having the priorities right?

Okay, let's do something about it. Listen to what this mother has to say about making time for kids. If a mother of 9 children can have spare time for her kids, I think you can do the same too. Of course, much easily.

When my children paid a visit to their grandparents last weekend, we didn't do much as it was a short trip. The kids had only 2 days, 1 night to spend.

To best make use of the trip, I tried to get the kids to bond and hopefully form a closer relationship with my parents and siblings, whom they only meet once every few months.

Of course, playing with kids was one of the ways. But there’s one problem. It took a while for the kids to “warm-up” and accept my parents as playmates. Furthermore, my folks can't match the grandchildren’s enthusiasm.

Fortunately, I found a better idea: watching home made videos.

A couple won't mark their 27th anniversary until Thursday, but they've already received the perfect gift: the wedding pictures they couldn't afford when they married as teenagers. Their photographer showed up last week at the diner where Karen Cline works and surprised her with a photo album from her big day in 1980.

"About a month ago, I was just cleaning out some of my old things and I found it," said photographer Jim Wagner, who's now 80. "I knew she didn't have any money back then, and I just thought she might like to have it."

"I just stood there and cried and cried and hugged him," Cline said afterward, tearing up again.

She recalled being a new bride at 18 and admiring the pictures, but feeling heartsick because she and her husband, Mark, who was 19 at the time, didn't have $150 to pay for them.

All these years, the Clines have had just one wedding picture that someone else took, of her walking down the aisle.

Wagner said he was able to track down Karen Cline after running into her stepfather a few weeks ago.

When the photographer showed up in the diner, she wrote him a check for the long-awaited $150 - and that's when he cried, she said.

Source: AP

A noisy parrot that likes to imitate sounds helped save a man and his son from a house fire by mocking a smoke alarm, the bird's owner says.

Shannon Conwell, 33, said he and his 9-year-old son fell asleep on the couch while watching a movie. They awoke about 3 a.m. Friday to find their home on fire after hearing the family's Amazon parrot, Peanut, imitating a fire alarm.

"He was really screaming his head off," Conwell said.

The smoke alarm had activated, but it was the bird's call that caught Conwell's attention.

"I grabbed my son and my bird, and got out of the house," he said.

Full report: Parrot Imitates Fire Alarm, Saves Family