Photo: Superheroes Are for Girls Too

On the last day of September, we're thankful for....

Move over muscle men! Girls fight bad guys, save Gotham and prove that superheroes aren't just for boys.

Caught on camera: Bear cubs stop traffic in the name of senseless fun.

Hurricane and bitter arguments: What one man learned from a yacht race around the world, including how "to leave it on the last wave"

Update: the math behind the miracle of your existence.

Photo: Think Stock

I have a little game I like to play at the grocery store. As the cashier tallies up the milk and eggs and cereal and more cereal (i have 2 boys), I bet her how much the final total will be. I either pick $175 or $136 or $111, depending on the way I think I shopped that particular Sunday. She picks what her experience tells her.  When we arrive at the real number and I'm closer,  I try not to rub it in and run around the aisles doing victory laps and stopping to moon various onlookers—but it's hard. First off, I rarely win anything so when I do I'm impossible. And second off, if I named the right number, I paid attention and shopped intelligently and the bill did not reach $375 as it did once dark, horrible night at the Stop N Shop off Route 210.

The joy of being frugal is a lot like the joy of eating one illicit grape while wandering the produce section—everybody experiences it, but nobody wants to talk about it. Two days ago, however, ABC news did a story about the cheapest family in America, who buy almost expired meat, freeze on-sale milk and hit the grocery store with walkie-talkies so they can talk to each other about deals while in different aisles. It had me laughing my head off and taking notes as to how they do it (hint: they prep for 4 hours before going to the store), because, let's face it, their total for 4 kids and 2 parents was $120 dollars—and that was for food for the WHOLE month!

Read More:
Watch the ABC video clip
Saving ideas from the Coupon Mom
Suze Orman: the emergency stash.

Photo: Getty

A lot of us think that our mothers are absolute nuts. I recently received confirmation of this when mine called and asked me to write an apology letter to the vet...from the voice of our family cat who bit the doctor during his routine check-up. And after watching an interview last week between Anderson Cooper and his mother posted on his website, I realized that celebrities also must wonder if their mothers are entirely normal. Cooper's mom happens to be revered designer, writer, actress, and socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, who created the first designer jeans and whose list of gentleman callers includes Errol Flynn, Marlon Brando, and Howard Hughes. Famous or not, however, Vanderbilt is still a proud mother—so proud in fact, that she keeps a life size cardboard cutout of Cooper in her apartment (because, she told her son, "I see you so rarely—you never call me") and has documented his entire television career on hundreds of VHS tapes. She also asked him to proofread her book—which provided explicit and detailed accounts of her sex life and many affairs. (Not exactly the type of information anyone wants to know about their mother.) But erotic stories and cardboard cutouts aside, Vanderbilt, like many moms, has words of wisdom that inspire and make navigating this crazy world a little bit easier. Here's what we learned as we listened in on the conversation between mother and son:

"You will laugh again. You will love again. It takes a long, long, long, long time. And you're never going to get over it. But never give up." Vanderbilt's advice to a mother and daughter in the audience who recently lost their son/brother to suicide. She tried to talk her own son (Cooper's older brother, Carter) off the ledge of their balcony before he fell to his death.  While Vanderbilt says that closure is "a TV word," she has never given up hope or allowed tragedy to harden her spirit. She still believes, at 87, that her next great love is right around the corner.

"Follow your bliss." While Cooper was looking for more specific direction after he graduated from college—perhaps a lecture on what career path to follow—Vanderbilt shared with him only three words.

"We are not put on this earth to see through one another, we are put on this earth to see one another through." Simple but true.

To find out who Vanderbilt's fantasy daughter is and how Cooper has made a career out of fibbing to his mother watch the show.

What's the best advice you've ever received from your mom? Share your life lessons.

Keep Reading:
Famous kids reflect on why mom always knows best
Meet a mother warrior
6 ways to make your mom queen for a day

Photo: Thinkstock

What were you doing when you were twenty? Daring...to change your major? Beating the odds...to get the biggest room of all your roommates?

Meet our new favorite 20-year-old, Ashley Fiolek. According to the New York Times magazine, the 5"2 Fiolek is the first woman to be signed to a major corporate motocross team and to twice win the X Games Motorcross gold. Pretty ballsy, particularly in a super-macho sport like motocross. But that's not all. Fiolek has been deaf since birth. "“I have been told that most people use sound to know when to shift,” she told the Times. “I feel when my motorcycle needs to shift. The engine’s vibrations change and I know it’s time.”

Can we all please just have an ounce of this woman's confidence?  She's not letting anyone tell her that she can't do what she wants, refusing even to see a disability as a disadvantage. It makes a person feel awfully silly for making excuses about why one can't do this or that. Get on that metaphoric dirt-bike today, why don't you, and feel what the vibrations are telling you.

More athletic inspiration:
The unexpected connection between spirituality and extreme sports.
Billie Jean King and 4 other women who changed everything.
Marion Jones opens up to Oprah.

Photo: Thinkstock

My college-sweetheart-husband and I didn't realize we'd married young until a year after our wedding, when we moved to New York. My new coworkers would go pale and say things like, "WHAT! You're MARRIED? Were you a CHILD BRIDE?" My husband and I laughed this phenomena off as just another weird New York City thing, like apartments with showers in the kitchens, or egg and cheese on a roll.

But as O magazine associate editor Katie Arnold-Ratliff writes in her thoughtful piece in Slate, statistics show that marrying young leads to increased odds of divorce. Arnold-Ratliff and her husband met when they were 15; their relationship sounds incredibly sweet, open, quirky, and supportive. And yet, they'd only been married a year when they separated. What went wrong?

Photo: Thinkstock

When we first heard about so-called "toning shoes" that would help strengthen our legs and glutes just by walking, we were highly skeptical...but also pretty optimistic. Given what we’ve heard about how just sitting on balance balls can help strengthen your abdominal muscles, it wasn’t such a huge leap. Plus, the shoes looked like regular sneakers, so even if this was a load of bunk, no one but us would realize that we were gullible enough to fall for it.

Well, turns out that we should have trusted our instincts. Earlier this week, the Federal Trade Commission accused Reebok of deceptive advertising for telling us all that wearing their EasyTone and RunTone shoes would help us stroll our way to a Jennifer Lopez-like backside. As part of a big settlement agreement, Reebok has agreed to pay $25 million in customer refunds. If you already bought a pair of these shoes, or some of the clothes from the Reebok toning apparel collection, you can apply for a refund by going to the FTC web site.

But maybe you've already grown attached to your toning-shoes-that-don't-really-tone. Over the past few years, there have been some who found the “micro-instability” of the shoes to be uncomfortable, and worried that it would lead to injuries. But many others have discovered that while the shoes’ impact on their bottoms have been negligible, they’ve been a boon for their feet. And earlier this summer, we interviewed a podiatrist who said that while she couldn’t vouch for the the slimming powers of toning shoes, she did think they were more supportive than typical flip flops. Reebok hasn't been asked to recall the shoes; they're just required to adjust their advertising claims.

if you like the feel or the looks, you can still buy them. Just know that the only way they'll help your physique is if you wear them while working out your lower body.

Here are a few things that really will help you shape up below the waist:
Bottom push-ups, single-leg circles and other exercises from a personal trainer
Lunges for your legs
The fencing workout that helped one reader take an inch off her tush

Photo: Thinkstock

Even if your Saturday or Sunday schedule bears a shocking resemblance to Monday's—the only difference being birthday parties and apple-picking outings take the place of conference calls and meetings—weekend dinners still feel a little more special than Monday-night meals. Maybe you sit down to the table a little later, and linger a half-hour longer. You eat dessert. You let the pots soak in the sink overnight.

Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift, co-creators of the public radio program The Splendid Table, live by Colette's words, "If you aren't up for a little magic now and then, you shouldn't waste your time cooking." They also live by these rules for eating weekends:

1. Enjoy the luxury of having time to make something from scratch, whether it's chicken stock or homemade pasta.

2. Spend a lazy afternoon in a new neighborhood where maybe you don't speak the language, but can find new markets and restaurants. Try Vietnamese, Indian, Ethiopian or one of these other global cuisines.

3. Share the work. Four or six hands at the stove and sink makes you feel less of an imprisoned kitchen wretch.

See Kasper and Swift's new book, The Splendid Table's How to Eat Weekends, for 100 recipes for Saturdays and Sundays, plus ways to incorporate leftovers into "Work Night Encores."

Keep Reading
Try a roasted pumpkin pasta dish this weekend
Sweet pears combine with spicy ginger, cinnamon, allspice and clove in this tasty fall dessert

The Pay-it-Forward Pillow: How one single mother makes life a little more comfortable for people in pain.

The U.S. (just barely) made the list! The ten best countries for women.

Clear your financial clutter and build your wealth, all while watching "Dancing With the Stars."

The Life Lifter: After five years of living in the woods, this once-homeless grandmother was given an apartment of her own--and a way to find meaning in her ordeal.

Here are some things I know how to draw: Stick figures, the sun, clouds, flowers, boxy houses, boxy cars and actual boxes. Trust me, these skills are very impressive to a three-year-old cousin who's still working on the motor skills required to hold a pencil. Not so much when it comes to a Pictionary team of competitive, adult friends who have 45 seconds to use those clues to guess Sense and Sensibility (Emma Thompson version). Enough evenings like that and a person might bolt for the nearest exit at the mere mention of Pictionary.

So I was surprised to find myself giggling at my desk this morning as I sketched "Sleep with the fishes johnny," a prompt from a complete stranger on the site Teledraw. Like Pictionary—or Telephone, from which it borrows part of its name—the game starts with a phrase provided by one player that is then drawn by another. But here's the twist: instead of an angry mob relying on my ability to accurately sketch a Godfather quote, my doodle was turned over to a third player who described what he saw ("man on flotation device while goldfish wait to devour him") that then became the clue for another player to interpret. And so on. Once you've submitted your work, you can trace the chain back to its source or forward until people are stumped by it.