My 6-year-old already has a callus from the Nintendo DS. My 4-year-old can flip on the Xbox without asking me for help. My husband disappears into his PC for hours while I hear the clang of swords. My brother and I take 'Rock Band' lunch breaks on any given Tuesday. From the hard core PC role playing games that take months, to the family Wii tournaments on a Sunday night...we are a gaming family.

Lately there has been a lot of talk about the White House being a big old boys club. Sure, we know that about half of the Obama staff is made up of women so why all the fuss? Oddly, a lot of it has to do with sports.

I grew up on a farm. I always think that is so normal, because most of my friends in Kansas City grew up in little towns in Iowa, Kansas or Missouri. It's mostly when I talk to my friends from the Interwebs that I realize my upbringing was so totally Huck Finn compared to the suburban or city childhoods they experienced.

Katie, a BlogHer member who is a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, brought to our attention a video from the Nike GameChangers series called Beat the BS. She said that " it really hits hard on a lot of the stereotypes we face as women (especially in sports) and how we can over come them." Naturally, I couldn't wait to check it out.

I'd say it's a good time to be a kid.  There seem to be endless clever and creative ideas available to parents for celebrating Valentine's Day.  I remember using store-bought Scooby Doo cards with my friends (because nothing breeds third-grade romance like a picture of Shaggy).  These days, however, the bar has been raised.  Here's a round-up of creative ideas for making this holiday special for your kids:

Sometimes I ponder the deep social implications and interconnections involved in producing a word (spoken in caps) like "FAIL" from my grandchild's lips. Other times I just wonder what the heck she's talking about. In an effort to keep you up on all the terms rushing into and out of our daily lexicon, here is a look at some of the latest slang. I say some because I don't know it all. Perhaps you can supply a few good terms yourself.

We bought our first video game system when my oldest son was six. He has intuitively been a fan of gadgets and technology from his earliest days; I knew, just knowing my kid, he was going to be a gamer. I greeted this fact with some trepidation, at first; I wondered if the purchase of our first system (a Nintendo GameCube, as it turned out) was the harbinger of great doom.

For me, the answer to that question is, heck yea (or it was until it got struck by lightning and died.) Will it help you get fit? It might but there are a lot of things to consider before you shell out the money for the game (or the system if you don't already have a Wii.) One of the first things I think you should consider before buying the Wii Fit is how you'll feel about the weigh in and the BMI components of the game. I'm anti-scale in general and I take issue with being "forced" to use the scale and/or BMI tools in order to do the regular check ins.

A word game makes the news in the New York Times. Does that sound plausible to you? It's not just plausible, it's real. The wildly popular Facebook game Scrabulous, an obvious knockoff of the board game Scrabble, hit the news when Hasbro and Mattel declared Scrabulous "piracy." According to the NYTimes article,