What kind of New Yorkers would choose to spend their weekends in podunk little country towns, without ocean waves and packed restaurants and Pilates classes and traffic jams and P. Diddy and a legion of publicists?

Their investment-banker husbands take home millions of dollars a year. They have beautiful children in private schools as well as nannies, trainers, and chauffeurs to help them live the good life. So what do they have to complain about? Plenty.

It used to be the battle of the sexes: Now it's the battle of the moms. Working and nonworking mothers are slugging it out in the schoolyard over who's the better parent -- and who gets to have a sex life.

Never have so many 13-year-olds had so much to dress up for. Some say the low-key bar mitzvah is coming back -- but not until the stock market crashes. Meanwhile, how does a quarter-million-dollar, multimedia, themed extravaganza sound? And will that be with or without the Grucci fireworks?

Nowadays, the rat race begins in nursery school, as some parents try to boost their kids' ERB test scores by any means necessary in order to get them into the right kindergarten. Is this any way to raise our children?

Parents appreciate Katherine Cohen's brains and her keen social instincts. Girls appreciate her fashion sense. Boys appreciate her good looks. All this has made her the East Side's hottest independent college counselor. But it still may not get your kid into Yale.

Yes, the kids are quiet. No, they're not on the street. But parents are finding that Buddy Lists and instant messaging have their own hazards.

On the Hudson in Columbia County, one of the most hallowed of American landscapes, a plan for a vast new cement plant -- with a skyscraping, 400-foot smokestack -- is igniting civil war between weekenders and locals.

On the surface, it's a classic showdown between homeowners resistant to change and neighbors intent on improving what is, after all, their own property. But up where Andrew Carnegie built his mansion, the ranks of the preservationist army include Kevin Kline, Paul Newman, and the Patton of the perambulator set, Woody Allen.