Help! My very smart, very self-assured 4-year-old daugther just spilled the beans on the Easter Bunny to her entire preschool class.

The teacher tried to brush over it, but after the class she pulled my wife to the side and implied in the nicest way that we need to get with the program and buy into the idea of supporting this myth.

And the real clincher: she's at a Christian preschool run out of a Methodist church! So basically it's a church telling us that we need to lie to our kids about something that we know they will eventually figure out and resent us for.

I think we'd just forget about the whole affair if it weren't for the fact that our daughter is traumatized by the experience for reasons that she refuses to talk about. We tried to explain that sometimes other people believe things that you don't, or that you don't want to ruin the "surprise" for the other kids (which is a strange way of putting it, since I have vivid memories of learning The Truth at the tender age of 6 and feeling deeply betrayed by my own parents.)

We asked her if the teacher, or some of the other kids, said something to her and she won't even have the discussion. To directly quote her: "WHY DO YOU KEEP ASKING ME THIS OVER AND OVER? I don't want to talk about it!" (Yes our 4-year-old often sounds like a 14-year-old).

And before anyone jumps on my case for being the bad guy for telling her the truth, we didn't. We simply didn't make a big deal about the easter bunny. We figured others would tell her about it, and they did. She came to her grandma and asked if there was really a bunny that brings a basket of eggs to your house with candy, because that didn't make sense to her. She'd never seen a bunny carrying a basket, and not with eggs, so it seemed silly to her. Her grandma, a former second-grade teacher, responded in the most tactful way: "Maybe you should think about that through Easter and then tell us what you think!" Well, my daughter had already made up her mind. She decided that either her grandma or parents dressed up as a bunny and that they brought the eggs early in the morning. Instead of outright lying to her, her grandma just smiled and said "Maybe!"

This is such a new thing for us, so I have to ask:

1) If you're a parent, did anything like this happen to you? If not with the Easter Bunny, maybe Santa Clause or Tooth Fairy?

2) How would you recommend dealing with this problem? In particular, how do we get our daughter to talk about what happened at school?

3) How do we help her not continue to let other kids in on the secret while also respecting her keen intellect at having figured it out at such a young age?

4) And finally, do you think parents are lying by continuing the myth of the Easter Bunny, especially with kids who are smart enough to know better?

OK, so for any of you Battlestar Galactica fans out there (yes, even those of you who are still "in the closet"), I want to hear what you have to say about last week's season finale. And just so I don't annoy anyone: SPOILERS FOLLOW!

So first: The leaders of the resistance on New Caprica against the Cylon occupation were ... Cylons themselves? What do you make of that? And how about the president's right-hand woman (and colonel Tigh) being Cylons? They're the two most trusted advisors on the civilian and military sides. As Tigh said when he learned his true identity .... whoah ....

And what about Roslyn getting a headache right when the other Cylons were feeling like "there must be somewhere out of here?" Was that an indication that she is the last of the final 5?

I don't even know what to make of Starbuck showing up again. It seemed like she was depicted in a way that could make her a figment of Lee's imagination. Or how about this. Was she an apparition like the 6 that Baltar sees?

And my final thought: maybe the 6 and Baltar-in-head-of-6 and the new Starbuck apparition and the supposed Cylon who lead Starbuck to her apparent death in the nebula are all A THIRD POWER that is neither Cylon nor human. In the original Galactica, there was a third species of angelic beings in "ships of light" and they showed up in an episode not uncoincidentally titled "The Return of Starbuck". This was after the original Starbuck (in that series, a dude) supposedly died.

So if this makes any sense to you, post a comment with your theories. And if it doesn't -- why aren't you watching Battlestar Galactica yet? It won a Peabody for Athena's sake, so get with the program already.