On the last day of January this year, I received an e-mail. It was a note about a potential opening for a writer to help create a new blog for The Post. I didn’t know it, but it would alter my life and introduce me to the genius of Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs (Paul Sakuma - AP) The e-mail arrived just about eight months after I’d left a good job in journalism, knowing that it would likely be my last in the industry. With the state of the economy, I expected the door would be closed to me if I tried to return.

But the heavy cost of childcare was eating up most of my salary and I had a nagging guilt about missing too much of my girls’ childhoods, so I decided that I’d rather focus on them for a few years and give up the writing career.

My husband understood. He agreed to shoulder the financial burden alone for two or three years. We thought that by then, I would be able to find a job, any job, that would help pay the bills and, hopefully, offer some flexibility.

The first six months after I quit were almost euphoric. My girls were happy to have me; their schedules were open. It was summer, then a beautiful fall and my attitude was flooded with gratitude.

By winter my new life began to lose its sheen. Our savings had been depleted. I began feeling guilty for splurging on after-school hot chocolates, then a babysitter, then a haircut. My husband seemed, to me at least, to be contributing at home less and less . My girls were over my (increasingly dour, perhaps) presence. I began to feel as if I was in a time warp. Betty Draper’s anger, I was beginning to understand.

From elsewhere in The Post: For chef-turned-Food-columnist David Hagedorn, his first lesson in the kitchen came from his mom. As a child she introduced him to ethnic foods such as sukiyaki, baba ghanouj or kibbe, and more common fare such as merengue kisses. She also showed him first-hand what bad veal piccata tastes like. Her mistakes and successes at the helm of a stove have stayed with him always.

“My mother, Carol Norberg, died in August at age 79, and since then I’ve realized just how much my food and cooking proclivities largely stem from her, either as imitations or rejections.”

From elsewhere in The Post: When a widowed parent decides to remarry, children involved must adjust to a new family. As one child writes to advice columnist Carolyn Hax, this adjustment can be painful.

“My mom passed away suddenly in November. My parents had been married for 40 years. My dad started dating two months after her passing and just got engaged. I have met his fiancee three times total, and they have been together for about six weeks.

Is it okay that I am not thrilled about this?”

In today’s Post, my colleague Tracy Grant takes on the dicey question so many parents face, particularly when their kids hit the tween years: To spy or not. She comes down forcefully on the side of spying:

“In a world in which 6-year-olds can play online games with faceless strangers, 10-year-olds have cellphones and 13-year-olds (and younger) have Facebook profiles, I posit that spying has never been a more important arrow in a parent’s quiver.

As a matter of fairness, kids should know their parents are spying on them, just like the Soviets knew we were spying on them.”

She braces herself for arguments from parents who might disagree: “...parents who rebelled against their parents’ strictures and who want nothing more than to be Little Johnny’s confidant and friend. “What about trust?” comes the collective cry.”

That’s a broad brush to use with anti-spying folks. There are certainly many parents who might believe their kids deserve more respect. But there’s another parenting philosophy that cautions against reading over a kid’s shoulder.

It comes from those who want to establish clear boundaries between their lives and their kids’ lives. It’s a group I tend to identify myself with (though I have yet to face the spying question head-on since my girls still compulsively tell me if they’ve been timed-out). It’s this perspective that considers intense spying as an extension of helicoptering.

Alexis Stewart has turned hiding from trick-or-treaters into the new wire-hanger tantrum.

Martha Stewart (Chip East - Reuters) Her new book, “Whateverland: Learning to Live Here,” written with her friend and radio and TV co-star, Jennifer Koppelman Hutt, (Wiley, October) is a broadside on her famous mother Martha. The book is not officially due to be released until later this month, but the best tidbits are unspooling already.

The book is said to contain a litany of complaints about Martha’s generally inattentive parenting, such as not bothering to prepare food or wrap presents, (actually forcing little Alexis to wrap her own). Worse, for a woman whose empire has been built on persona, it lists a series of embarrassing indignities. Alexis claims her mother routinely left the bathroom door open when she relieved herself, and that she annually avoided trick-or-treaters by turning the lights off in the home, essentially, hiding from kids. (The Daily Mail reported the details with exuberance after nabbing an early review copy.)

A group of top marketing minds recently gathered to hash out what parents want. Those on the Advertising Week panel called “Moms and the New Zeitgeist,” came up with the not-so-profound answer that when selling to parents — who apparently control $2.3 trillion dollars in purchasing power — use “humor and insight.” More interestingly, the advertising executives offered what they thought were the most effective recent commercials targeting parents (and in one case, just mothers):

Toyota’s “Swagger Wagon”

Olay’s “Younger Skin”

Despina Tekeli, a 12-year-old girl from Greece, was the grand prize winner of last year's National Geographic International Photography Contest for Kids with this photograph entry.   (Despina Tekeli) From elsewhere in The Post: Kids can win a $25,000 college fund or other prizes by entering contests happening this month and later on during the school year.

KidsPost has details on Jif’s Most Creative Peanut Butter Sandwich Contest, the National Geographic Photography Contest and the Pets Add Life Poetry Contest.

From elsewhere in The Post: When a 4-year-old girl starts asking what happens if the house catches on fire, or a tornado comes hey way, her parent reaches out to Family Almanac columnist Marguerite Kelly for advice.

“We try to give simple answers to her but when we ask what she would do, she tells us that she is a fairy and that she would simply fly away or become invisible. Usually I just say, “Really? Can a fairy put out a fire?” but nothing more because I don’t want to make her anxious. However, I worry that she won’t know how to respond if she is ever in a real emergency and I wonder if we should teach emergency procedures to her, like “stop, drop and roll” or tell her to get help from another mom with children if we ever got separated at the store,” says the letter writer.

The Pew Research Center released a report Monday from its Social and Demographic Trends project that confirms what many of us have seen and been living through: We Americans are moving in with extended families at a staggering rate.

“Without public debate or fanfare, large numbers of Americans enacted their own anti-poverty program in the depths of the Great Recession: They moved in with relatives. This helped fuel the largest increase in the number of Americans living in multi-generational households in modern history,” say Rakesh Kochhar and D’Vera Cohn, authors of the report.

The explosion is fueled most by the return migration of young adults age 25-34. More than one-in-five lived in multi-generational households in 2009. The Pew report focuses on how the trend has helped these adults and their parents get through this relentless financial gloom. The flip side is that the solution is causing its own relentless test of family bonds.

Among those 25-34 years old are two distinct populations: There’s younger, frustrated unemployed or underemployed children moving back home with parents who often have their own financial troubles. And, there’s parents of young children — stressed, over-extended and sleep-deprived parents who may have confused children and resistant spouses in tow. The Waltons, it’s not.

New academic year = new friends. Not just for the kids, but for the parents, too.

A new school year is an opportunity for parents to befriend like-minded moms and dads. (Andrea Bruce - The Washington Post) Every September a new grade, or even a new school, brings us close to a new set of people who are, on paper, so much like us. They have children the same age as ours, and they are enduring and/or enjoying similar developmental joys and challenges in their families.

But parents, like their kids, are a giant mix of personalities. With some we fit naturally (hello boozy class cocktail parties) and some we don’t (advice: Forget to wear glasses to school drop off, the easier to participate in eye contact avoidance).

How often are these connections and disconnects based on parenting styles? How much do our judgements on parenting play into our feelings?

Eliana Osborn, a contributing writer for the Imperfect Parent Web site, explains in an essay on that site that she un-friended two of her closest female friends after she witnessed what she considered lazy parenting.

She writes: “Is it possible to stay friends with women when you can’t stand how they raise their kids? I like a lot of things about both Monica and Kathy. If I didn’t, this wouldn’t even be an issue. As women, I want to be friends. As mothers, I don’t want to be anywhere near them.”

Her own answer is no.