Keeping the car clean isn't an easy task, particularly when hauling the kids on a long driving trip. We tend to do the 12-14 hour driving trip once or twice a year to visit relatives in other states, and the car inevitably turns into a hazardous, germ-infested trap each time we do.

Even the short trips cause problems. My youngest son once squeezed a half-full juice box - and promptly started shaking it up and down as hard as he could. Juice got on everything- from the windows to the carpet to the ceiling - as he laughed his head off. Now - no juice boxes are allowed in the car!

Here are some tips to Travel with Kids But Keep the Car Clean. You can also share your own tips.

Although most of us are focused on the romance that comes with Valentine's Day, Feb. 14 has also become National Donor Day. The goal is to help spread the word about organ donation and the actions all of us can take to help.

More than 110,000 people are currently waiting for an organ donor. So, what can you do? Here are some simple suggestions from the Health Resources and Services Administration:

• Register with your State Donor Registry, see that your driver's license reflects your wishes, and make sure your family knows you want to be a donor.
• Sign up to become a potential volunteer of marrow and blood stem cells.
• Donate your baby's umbilical cord blood stem cells at birth.
• Donate blood.  (Donors with O-negative blood - like me - are always in demand.)
• Check out the new and improved organdonor.gov for more information and resources, including state-specific information on donor registration.

I ran across this cute blog post at Momtourage asking what would you do if your 6-year-old asked to have his girlfriend over. It got me thinking: What would I do?

This is an issue I haven't run into - yet. My youngest son did want to marry his older sister and was quite disappointed to find out that he couldn't. One of my daughters wanted to marry her best friend - a 3-year-old just a year younger than her. Other than that, my boys tend to be in that "ugh, girls are terrible" stage. And, my daughters are in the "ugh, boys are stinky" stage. (My 8-year-old daughter actually came home and cried because she - gasp - had to hold a boy's hand in school during a dance lesson at gym.)

So, what would I do? After I finished laughing - or crying that my kids are growing up so fast - I'd probably try to calm down and come up with a reasonable alternative (just like the blog's author did). What would you do?

Students close to the top of a school's popularity hierarchy are the most likely to torment their peers, according to a new study from the University of California, Davis. The most popular students - those at the very top - as well as those at the bottom are generally not the most aggressive kids.

Researchers speculated that the kids at the very top either had more to gain by being social and kind or they were somehow not prone to aggression. Meanwhile, those trying to reach the top used antagonistic behavior to get there.

What can parents (policy makers, teachers and other educators) take away from this? Robert Faris, an assistant professor of sociology at the university and study co-author, noted that "I would start by focusing on the kids who are not involved and work on encouraging them to be less passive or approving of these sorts of antagonistic relationships. It's through these kids who are not involved that the aggressive kids get their power."

I took that to mean that getting kids involved in the school community as well as encouraging healthy friendships will go a long way towards ensuring they don't become an aggressor or get picked on by those trying to claw their way to the top. Here's some ideas to help your child find an extracurricular activity:

My tween has no hobbies, how can I help her find an extracurricular activity?

Creative and Unusual Extracurricular Activities (Ideas from Readers)