Family Matters

YOU DON'T REALIZE how out of shape you are until you are forced to climb a long flight of stairs, and the same can be said about marriage. You never know how out of shape your relationship is until a crisis hits. Mort and Ari Fertel, who recently moved to Baltimore County from Florida, faced a more tragic crisis than most. They lost a son and then twin daughters after only days of life, and they escaped their pain by running away from each other. "My wife became very depressed, and I immersed myself in work," Mort Fertel says.

HOW GOOD A gardener do you have to be to keep one tomato plant alive? I am no Farmer in the Dell. And I am not aiming for a victory garden. I just want to be able to walk out my back door and pick a warm, red tomato every day or so. Not a pepper or a cucumber or an eggplant or a handful of sugar snap peas. They all taste just fine from the grocery store. But tomatoes donM-Ft. Even the ones marked M-tlocally grownM-v taste like winter tomatoes, all grainy and bland and dry. Tomatoes are the one vegetable that you have to grow yourself.

JUST FOR PARENTS Advice and strategies to help your children read Holiday Hanukkah is a festival of lights Exploring the ways everyone has of celebrating together at this time of the year helps people feel connected to each other during the holiday season. Tonight Jews around the world will celebrate the first night of Hanukkah, The Festival of Lights. This holiday commemorates events that took place over 2,300 years ago in the land of Judea, which is now Israel. Long ago the Syrian King, Antiochus, ordered the Jewish people to reject their God, their religion and their customs.

Q. My 4-year-old son has developmental delays. His speech has been delayed since age 2, at which time his pediatrician said he was "just lazy." When my son was 2 1/2, the pediatrician again told me he was fine and would catch up. When he was 3, I told the doctor that I felt my son was making progress because he was "imitating" my speech. The doctor said this was good.When he was 3 1/2, I knew we had a serious problem. Normal speech was not progressing, but what I now know as "echolalia" was.Since then my son has been in speech therapy and occupational therapy.

The next peanut-butter-and- banana sandwich you fix for your child, cut it in half for her, then in fourths, then maybe in eighths for a quick, simple lesson in fractions. Her grade-school teacher will thank you come fall. Children savor the do-nothingness of vacation, but some educators warn that students shouldn't be encouraged to shift their brains into neutral for the summer. "There's growing evidence that children's reading and math achievement scores tend to decline over the summer vacation," says Andrea Greenhoot, a developmental psychologist at the University of Kansas.

My husband covers sports for USA Today, and today he is covering the Super Bowl. I think he is hoping that fact will finally impress the kids. Over the years, he has traveled so much for his job that the kids occasionally have failed to realize when he was out of town, let alone what he was doing. There is no question that there is a certain cachet in covering big-time sporting events. It sure beats being a door-to-door salesman. But that isn't a distinction your toddler is going to make.

MY COMFORTER is calling me, and I can't resist its siren song. It calls to me as soon as the sun sets, and it whispers to me at dawn. It sings to me, and its lullaby is irresistible. It has deceptive power, this down comforter in its pale blue duvet cover. Though light as a feather, it might as well be chain mail, so helpless am I to escape the weight of it on me. But then I do not struggle very hard. My comforter carries some kind of number that lets you know how warm, warmer, warmest it is. It is called "fill weight" -- no attempt to sugarcoat things here -- and the numbers range from 550 to 650. I think that refers to how many geese are now naked so that I may be warm, but I do not know for sure.

IT IS DECEMBER, and high school kids everywhere, not to mention the one hanging on my fridge like a vulture, are waiting to learn how they scored on the PSATs and the SATs.It is an irony of these tests that they measure what our kids know about a variety of topics, such as analogies, that may never come up in real life or in a conversation with a potential employer.But the kids know without being reminded by us that their scores are the first link in a chain of circumstances that will determine how they do in life, so they cram and get tutored and take courses and learn test-taking strategies.

My husband had no more turned from the grave of his mother than he said, "Now begins the search for the Holy Grail." By that, he did not mean the search for the secret offshore bank accounts. He did not mean the box of faded letters that would reveal his family to be exiled royals. He did not even mean her will. He meant her recipes. And particularly, her cookie recipes. Everybody's mother makes great cookies, except, of course, my children's mother. At a recent office bake-off, mine were the first ones dismissed from the competition.

The people who come to see psychiatrist Gordon Livingston at his Columbia office are not whiners. That's a common misunderstanding about people who enter talk therapy - that they want someone who will listen to them complain. But the paradox of psychiatry is that it often takes real courage, and sometimes real effort, to crawl out of bed and find help. Just the act of opening the Yellow Pages and picking up the phone may seem impossible to someone in the depths of depression or in terrible turmoil.