There are a lot of family dinners this week which means an opportunity for overeating and sullen children. Or maybe it's just me. I have a child who hates large family meals that have any kind of religious overtones.

Our family is celebrating Passover this week, and we had two large Seders between my parents and my husband's parents house. A Seder is a feast celebrating the Jews escaping from slavery in Egypt (essentially the story as told in the movie The Ten Commandments), and is preceeded by an hour of ritual prayers and discussions. The before-dinner part can be a bit boring, especially when everyone is hungry.

In the past, my son has been rude and difficult at the Seder, he mutters under his breath and leaves the table abruptly. His father is generally pretty close behind him, sometimes under the guise of disciplining him and sometimes not. They both detest religious holidays because they hate being told what to do. We are not a religious family, the Jewish holidays are really a way to get together and celebrate life as a family and to eat – a lot. They don’t see the part of religious holidays that I like: the connection to history and to others around the world, the celebration of being a family. For them sitting for 45 minutes listening to Hebrew prayers and the Moses story is painful.

I noticed the evil stares when I was being pushed through the airport in a wheelchair. I was seven months pregnant with a black eye and a leg in a cast. The icy looks were focussed on my husband but they were mis-directed; the black eye was courtesy of Aaron slamming a sippy cup into my face and the sprained ankle was from slipping on the stairs while carrying my three-year old. He, of course, was totally fine.

Once, I got a panicked call from a friend with a 9-month old, the baby had stuck his finger in her husband's eye and the those little jagged fingernails had ripped his cornea. My friend later admitted that the injury drove a temporary wedge in the relationship between dad and baby. It is one thing to know rationally that there was no motive behind the attack, but it is hard to tell your reflexes that every time that little finger comes near your face.

Pinch marks, hickeys from biting, and toys to random parts of the body are all part of parenting the under-twos. Sometimes you look down at your bruised body and you can’t even trace the origin of the injury. Remember Unidentified Party Injuries (UPIs) from your misspent youth? Well these are Unidentified Parenting Injuries (UPIs).

My one-year old nephew was here with all his painfully cute one-year old traits like smiling back at anyone who smiles at you (even sullen 10-year olds) and blowing kisses. He reminded me how much toddlers love to dance: every time he heard music – whether it was a clip from a commercial or a few seconds of a song he would be bobbing up and down and clapping his hands. The kid even loved the Mini Pops Kids.

I know there are musicethnologists, anthropologists, neurologists and lots of other ologists out there that are wrestling with the question whether or not music is innate but watching a toddler enjoying random tunes just answers that question for me.

Jian Ghomeshi, on CBC Radio’s Q, had musician, composer,and music enthusiast  Bobby McFerrin as the live guest on Friday where they discussed (among other things) the innate nature of music. Ghomeshi referenced the following  YouTube video where McFerrin gets an entire audience at the World Science Festival to predict and sing on the pentatonic scale en masse.

If you have been reading Embrace the Chaos for a while, then you know some things about me: I have three kids, I like food, my husband is a neat-freak and I make typos. I have to assume that if you are returning to this blog then you are a fan of run-on sentences, parentheses, the word ‘and’, and the occasional snarky comment.

Some people, however are not fans of my grammatical errors. I am sure that they have not chosen to single me out. They simply hover around cyberspace as copyediting vigilantes searching out forgotten apostrophes and incorrectly applied adverbs. They obviously believe that their services are making the world a better place. In fact, they have even told me that:

Every woman made a choice, or had a choice made for her about breastfeeding. And behind every choice is a story. Here is mine.

My first child would not or could not nurse. There were lots of issues working against us; he was born early and in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for three days, he was tongue-tied and needed help latching; I had poor milk supply because of a previous surgery. And we didn’t have very knowledgeable support, despite the fact that we were at a “breast-feeding friendly” hospital.

For the first few weeks I cried many tears of frustration and anger, I cried on the phone to my best friend, to the useless lactation consultant, but mostly by myself holding my beautiful, bottle-fed baby in my arms. After a while I learned to enjoy the good parts of bottle-feeding; the freedom and watching my husband hold Aaron in his arms and feed him.

My husband’s phone started buzzing at approximately 8:13 p.m. on March 22, 2008. “Your house is glowing, you can see it from down the street”, said one text. “Your lights are on!” said another.

We had left our lights on during Earth Hour 2008, the World Wildlife Foundation’s initiative to have everyone around the world turn their lights out at the same hour. Unfortunately, my husband and I were at an event and while we were out, our babysitter chose not to turn out all the lights while putting the three kids to bed. What may have been a good decision for her made us the neighbourhood pariahs the next day.

We live in a super green neighbourhood, the expensive organic store is the busiest on the street, Bullfrog power signs are everywhere and people use their bicycle for transportation 365 days a year. But worse than the (mostly) friendly kidding was that our kids weren’t able to be part of something bigger than them.

When my grandfather died, I sat down for “the talk” with my then four and half year old son. I told him that Great-Papa (actually we called him Great-Papa Who Sits in the Chair so that’s a clue about his general health), had died and that we were going to the funeral. 

Aaron didn’t react with emotional questions; he wanted to know about the burial and “the box”. I tried to assure him that being dead meant that Papa no longer had any feelings so I said: “It’s only Papa’s body in the box.”  I was trying to say that the person who we knew was no longer there, and in retrospect it was such a weird thing to say because we are not religious and I really wasn’t trying to hint that he was anywhere else.

My son looked at me and says: “So where are his head and his legs?”

No one moves through parenthood unscathed.The mental and physical toll starts as soon as the sperm hits the egg. First to go is those nightly glasses of wine, then modesty, then the wardrobe, the hope of ever having a bikini body, and the hits just keep on coming. What if you dared to document all those things that your kids have wrecked, smashed, ruined, drawn on, peed on, stretched out, or just worn down beyond recognition?

Well, a website is taking submissions. Shit My Kids Ruined is a compendium of photos sent in from parents showing the damage that has been waged against their homes and in some cases their bodies and their dreams.

Some of my favourites (courtesy of Shit My Kids Ruined) :

Of the many parts of me they’ve ruined, I miss my brain the most.

According to Margaret Wente, columnist at Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, I don’t exist and neither do the hundreds and thousands of female bloggers out there.

In her column, “Why Are Bloggers Male?”, Wente  explains why she doesn’t have a blog and in doing so ignores the thousands of posts and millions of hours that women have spent online documenting their lives, their businesses and their opinions. There is rich irony in one of the few female editorial writers in the country ignoring the writing of other women, because of course she does have a blog – it is just printed on paper. Wente obviously does not spend much time online because it is hard not to trip over an entire universe populated by women with strong opinions. If she had bothered looking there is an organization called Blogher that has a network of over 2,500 blogs written by women that gets 20 million unique visitors a month.

Who’s with me? March Break, well it kind of sucks. With no holiday to anchor it March Break is soggy, boring and a reminder to those of us who are not on a beach somewhere that our kids need constant entertainment.

And the usual places for kid fun: museum, science centre, my sister’s house, are crowded and unappealing. My husband is at work and lots of our friends are in better places than us.  Yes, the weather is great but there is only so much mudslinging (figurative and real) that the kids can do.