Your period, your "time of month," your "friendyy-whatever you call it, most women experience menstruation for the first time between the ages of nine and sixteen, and every month (twenty-eightdays or so) after that. The funny thing is, although both girls and boys know about it, know that it happens to females, the purpose of menstruation and how it works remain a mystery to most people. This is a sad thing. Knowing how the human body works allows us to appreciate it that much more. Knowing how and why a female menstruates allows people of both genders to unlock the mystery of a woman's fertility cycle.

The bottom-line purpose of menstruation is so that a woman can get pregnant. Each month, an egg is released by one of a woman's two ovaries. The egg travels to the uterus by way of the fallopian tubes. The idea here is that once the egg is released, it will be fertilized by a sperm and be on its way to becoming a fetus and ultimately a baby. So, in order for the future baby to be comfortable, the uterus starts to develop a thick, cushy lining made up of blood and nutrients while the egg is making its way down the fallopian tube. In a way, the uterus is getting ready for its "house guest"-one that it thinks will stay for about nine months.

Most of the time, however, the egg is not fertilized and just passes right through the uterus without even stopping to say hello; it simply dissolves instead. Since the uterus has no one staying in it, it doesn't need all that nutrient-rich lining it created. So, it sheds this lining through the vagina. It is this lining that is the blood of a woman's period. This cycle of egg release and uterus preparation will happen practically every month until the ovaries stop releasing eggs. Most women have their periods for about
thirty years or more.

Over the last summer vacation, how often do you think your child picked up a little extracurricular reading? Children don't usually see any models in their family either; adults aren't the first in the room to jump at the chance to read a book over a holiday exactly. There was a study published in the New York Times recently that proves that children in low-income families typically lose as many as 10 IQ points over the course of a standard school summer vacation. The reason - middle-class parents usually send their children packing to music lessons or a child book club or two over any extended holiday. This doesn't usually happen in poor low-income families. Harried overworked parents hardly have the time to think about this.

Now IQ isn't some hard-to-pin-down scholastic test figure. IQ measures often have some real visible effects on how things work out for your child when she gets back to school in September. Many studies observe a lower ability at reading when school reopens. They see this happen so often, they actually have a name for it - Summer Slide. So how does that work - does a child actually make up the IQ loss over the course of the next school year? Unfortunately, that's not how it happens. Which the loss makes the child lag badly the following year, the vacation that shows up then only adds to the IQ loss that occurred earlier. It's cumulative. Now it isn't difficult to put an end to this of course. Most of our modern problems have simple and straightforward solutions - head to a child book club and sign your child up. It doesn't matter what she reads - just as long as she does.

Did you ever think that fiction - the typical child detective stories, Hardy boys or anything could hardly ever be as good as activity books or puzzles? Activities certainly seem do be what you should think of to help your child keep her edge; but that's not exactly how it works out. In a study with hundreds of children, they found out that children who did regular activity books and puzzles were nowhere near the junk-reading children in general intelligence scores and reading scores. If you want to put a figure on it, a summer of reading gives a child the same level of advancement as two years of summer school.