Month March 2015

Please excuse my terrible informality of not addressing you as duke and duchess, respectively, but I’d like to note that I am addressing you by your first names for a reason. I imagine that, at this point in your lives, you’re rather fond of your names. You’ve grown into them and like the sound of them for various reasons. Kate, maybe you like yours because your favorite thing to do could be curling up on a Kensington Palace couch on a rainy day and binge watching the classic American sitcom, Kate and Allie. Will, perhaps you’re a giant fan of will.i.am and sometimes do a spirited performance of “Boom Boom Pow” in the shower.

I’m pretty attached to my first name, too. It is Alice. Rumor has it that you might give this lovely five-letter moniker to your daughter. I’m asking you, your highnesses, to refrain.

Cathy Engelbert made history this month by becoming the first woman CEO of one the nation’s largest consulting and accounting firms. Engelbert joined Deloitte in 1986, but she says her leadership training began long before that, as a Collingswood kid growing up with seven siblings.

As Engelbert begins her tenure overseeing the work of nearly 70,000 employees from her office in Parsippany, she took some time to reflect on past triumphs, one regret and her vision for the future.

Q. You’re the first female CEO of a Big Four consulting and accounting firm. Do you feel that distinction brings with it additional pressure, beyond what other CEOs — those who aren’t breaking glass ceilings — feel?

It’s actually a real positive. I can’t tell you how overwhelmed on the positive side I’ve been by the support, the letters from young men and women around the country, in universities, in our workforce, outside of our workforce.

Mitch Rothschild is a veteran entrepreneur who believes his latest venture, Vitals, is well on its way to becoming a household name. …Earlier this month, Rothschild stepped down as Vitals’ CEO. He recently took time to explain his move and share insights into life as the leader of a growing business. (Edited for clarity and length.)

Q. You founded some half a dozen companies before Vitals. What drives you to keep starting new businesses?

Are you a mom who took maternity leave? It was the best vacation ever, right? Didn’t you just laze the days away on your unstained sofa, snuggled up with a good book and a glass of Cabernet while your precious one slept peacefully all night and day long? Didn’t you emerge from your two or six or 12 weeks — 12! You slacker! — feeling relaxed and refreshed, and not, say, like a leaky-boobed sleepless zombie prone to intermittent crying fits and painful flashbacks to the time someone sewed her genitals back together after they expelled an entire human being?

There’s no escaping it: If you’re indoors with your toddler for the day, often you’ll be stuck entertaining him or her for hours instead of attending to lofty goals like investigating cold fusion, drafting global peace treaties or, you know, cleaning out the kitchen junk drawer — all critical tasks that are rather difficult to accomplish with a chubby troublemaker underfoot.

That’s not to say that toddlers aren’t capable of entertaining themselves — it’s just how they choose to do it that can drive any mom or dad batty. Presenting nine games your toddlers would love to play, if only you’d let them:

Ring Around the Coffee Table

Run around the coffee table in circles. Whoever doesn’t pass out from exhaustion first wins.

Can you picture what the world would look like if men could lactate and women could not? A co-ed group of California high school students did and the results were amazing.

School boys would brag about how far they could “fire” their breast milk, lactation would be weaponized in video games, and “Brad Titt” would star in such films as “Money Boob.” On a more serious note, “breastfeeding in public would be encouraged” and men “would bring their babies to their workplace and it wouldn’t be a distraction,” according to an essay by Madison Holland, Peter King, Zack Matar, and Jacob Rivera, 11th graders at Pioneer High School in San Jose, Calif.