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With some kids on holiday, and more about to take a break from school for Chinese New Year, the time is right to stock up on some educational, yet entertaining, math apps to help sharpen the skills of the young minds in the family.

The first app in our math roundup is Grow Your Garden by Learning Yard. This adorable app uses visual cues in the shape of water droplets to encourage kids to add and subtract the correct amount of water for each flower that they grow in their garden. Little by little, the plants get properly cared for and eventually fill your child’s garden. Reina (4.5 years of age) enjoyed solving the problems to get to the flowers, with only occasional assistance from mama and baba. Grow Your Garden is rated 4+ and is available for $0.99 for the iPhone and $1.99 for the iPad at the App Store.

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If you’re going to be in Beijing over the Chinese New Year holidays (like me), take the opportunity to visit a temple fair. Temple fairs (or miaohui) are traditional celebrations replete with religious ceremonies, folk performances, traditional crafts (such as paper cutting and scroll writing), vendors hawking toys and kitsch, and scrumptious snack stalls. They usually take place at temples and parks, but several international schools also organize their own. Click through for a rundown of 2012 temple fairs. Be prepared: temple fairs can get very crowded during the holidays.

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My partner, Guo Jian, has been priming me for the “moon month” or zuo yuezi (坐月子).

When my in-laws were here a couple of weeks ago (the precursor to their more permanent visit before the baby’s arrival) and we were downstairs helping to unload the car, a perfect stranger noticed my advanced pregnant shape, the presence of parental figures and Guo Jian and I helping them with their things. This stranger very confidently turned to Guo Jian and half-asked and half-stated, “Your parents have come to help you through the moon month?” To this woman, there could be nothing more obvious. Guo Jian just smiled and nodded. His parents glowed with pride.

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In a Slate article called “Cesarean Nation: Why do nearly half of Chinese women deliver babies via C-section?”, author and journalist Mara Hvistendahl looks at the reasons behind China’s skyrocketing cesarean rates. Between 2007 and 2008, a whopping 46 percent of Chinese babies were born via C-section – the highest documented rate in the world. This number is three times higher than the World Health Organization’s recommended 15 percent threshold.

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Shortly after we moved to Beijing, I met my wife for lunch on a balmy afternoon and at the end of the meal, she asked our waitress for a fapiao and explained to me that it had a scratch off award area. She scratched away the silver bar and underneath was a prize for RMB 10. Beaming like the Cheshire Cat, she returned to the cashier to receive her cash winnings.  Ever since, I’ve been scratching away. Everywhere I ate, I requested a fapiao like a man desperate to win the lottery. However, after three years of fruitless scratching, I still had not won once. I decided this exercise in chance was futile and simply gave up.

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As a nutritionist, one of the questions I get asked the most around this time of year is how to lose those few extra pounds (or, in some cases, kilograms) put on over the holidays. And this year, as with every year, the perpetual discussion about fad diets and quick weight loss programs is back in full force. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had friends ask me about the cabbage soup diet, the South Beach diet, the HCG diet, and the Hollywood diet. Some of these are simply strange and unsustainable – no one can (or should) eat just cabbage soup for any prolonged period of time – while others, like the HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadotropin hormone) diet are unproven and even quite possibly dangerous.

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Slate is on fire this month! Hot on the heels of a feature about C-sections, the magazine published a story called “The truth about epidurals” last Wednesday. Author Melinda Wenner Moyer says that women face a slew of conflicting statements when it comes to epidurals. On one hand, the injections contribute to “the over-medicalization of motherhood.” On the other, pregnant women must face the prospect of squeezing “a head the size of a grapefruit through [their] much-smaller-than-a-grapefruit-sized vagina.” What’s a smart, informed, and totally not panicked future mom to do?

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Numerous times in the last four years that we’ve lived here, questions about the authenticity of jug bottled water has been a topic of debate. Those of us expats with water coolers in our homes – most of us -- generally use the reliable Nestle or Watson’s brands of water. Occasionally, a person might question the taste of the water, or simply the look of the bottle that has been delivered. Is it real? Is it fake? What are we really drinking?

Because we’ve had no problems or concerns in our household, I haven’t really been too concerned with proving that what we have is real. That is, until I saw the water bottles pictured above behind our neighborhood Jenny Wang’s. My head wanted to justify what these were all doing there, but I couldn’t come up with anything. So I started to go back to those information posts I had previously ignored. I wanted to know.

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Chinese New Year is coming, so is Midweek Giveaway. This week we are giving away an afternoon tea set for a family at Crêpanini.

The tea set includes:

• 4 sweets: simple crêpes
• 4 hot drinks or soft drinks

To win, simply comment on the post below with the answer to the question: What is your favorite sweet treat?

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