It seems that there is a trend of parents suing their estranged children for support when they are old and infirm to broke to pay the bills. It is a sad story and one that is getting increased political and legal attention.

Needless to say, I hope not to be in that situation where I am estranged from my children, broke and needing cash.

But there are a few things that I would like back from my kids:

My name is Emma. As in number six on the most popular names of the decade and number two in Canada for 2008.

Everywhere I go I hear people calling my name and I can quite get used to it. In the playground I am yelled to get off the slide, I am constantly being asked to hold someone’s hand, to hurry up and to listen. Little girls call me over to play, and tweens want my cell phone number.

Can you tell it is hard for me to get used to having the same name as the under-12 set? (and I am a bit of a narcissist) I’m just not used to sharing my name. I grew up with people calling me Emily because they had never heard of an Emma before. I was the only Emma I knew until high school.

People always used to ask me where the name came from. If I was feeling literary I said Jane Austen' if I was feeling radical I said Emma Goldman and if they were of the older generation I told them the truth.

When we had my daughter, my husband looked at me and quoted Chris Rock “A father’s job is to keep his daughter off of the pole” (hear that Billy Ray?). But what is a father’s job when it comes to raising boys? This amusing article from Esquire has some thoughts on that.

What is my role? Well, I would like to discourage my boys from funding the girls on the pole but also I want my boys to know that men are as emotionally complex as women. I want my boys to know that burping and farting at the table is OK but only sometimes, that not all girls are mean girls or dorks and that as they say in Free To Be You and Me: It’s all right to cry.

When I was in school I would have given anything to get an athletic award at an assembly or to sing a solo at a concert. But I was not athletic and I was not musical.  I was just a smart kid with a good vocabulary who could make a funny wisecrack or two. Winning the spelling bee in grade two was as close as I got to a public acknowledgment of my talents.

As a non-award winner, it was very moving for me when my non-athletic, non-musical son stepped up on stage in front of  his peers, teachers and parents to accept an award for math. He is only in grade four but at his school they give out academic awards (math, English, French) in each grade starting in grade 4. There are also two annual awards for athletics and music at the same assembly (and many other awards at a school-wide assembly). The school treats these awards seriously, as do the kids.

The interesting thing about these academic awards are that they are for excellence. The awards are not for trying hard, they are for the kids who excelled and showed a passion in each area. My son has an incredible natural talent for logical reasoning and  math (unlike his innumerate mother). The award confirmed what he, and the other kids already knew, that he is highly proficient in math. For that moment, the kid who can’t catch a ball felt acknowledged as a leader on the same plane as the athletes.

When Bruce Felier was diagnosed with bone cancer, his thoughts immediately turned to his young daughters. They had a mother but who would step in to the father figure role? He came up with theidea of a Council of Dads, asking six of his friends each to fill a certain role in his daughters’ lives.

Bruce Feiler got the opportunity to minutely plan who would be the male role models in his daughters lives after his death. But the death didn’t happen, and Feiler was left with an artificial leg but also a strong idea of who he wanted to surround his daughters should he indeed die. One of the best things that happened, he said, was that these men also reached out to his daughters while he was ill, building a supportive network that continues to enrich all their lives. He said that telling his friends how he felt about them resulted in much closer bonds kind of like being “friend-married”. (He also got a book contract, but I digress)

It is a lovely story and spurs one to think about what would I do in that situation? Who in my life could be an inspiration to my kids? Who could be a role model? Who could be the memory keeper? Who would act as a mother, when there was none.

I noticed my seven-year old scratching the back of his head a lot. Every time I saw him do it, my head felt itchy too. It’s psychosomatic, I decided.

I asked the pediatrician to give his head a once-over when we were there last week to get his stitches checked. All clean, she said. But I still wondered and scratched and itched.

But when my neighbour said that all her kids had lice and so did she did I start to go into panic mode. Monday morning after a weekend of scratching I checked my hair with an old lice comb and then called The Lice Squad. I could not rest until I knew the answer: were we infected?

(Take a minute to scratch your head before you click to the next page.)

People with one child are sometimes embarrassed when they meet me and my three kids. “I don’t know how you do it!” they often say. “I can hardly handle one.” And they go home to their quiet house with their perfectly-behaved child while I drag two fighitng kids plus third insolent child home.

"That’s OK", I tell them. "I could hardly handle one child either, or two, and I definitely can’t really handle three." I always say, "space fills a vacuum -- one child takes all your time or three children take all your time." And that is probably true with four and five kids too. But I’m not willing to find that one out.

My husband and I did float the topic of a fourth child around. From what I understand even numbers ensure a level of fair play that is pretty much impossible for a threesome. But in the end we decided that a family with four kids works better when the mother is a Type A personality, and since I am closer to an X or Y we decided to leave it to three.

I got an email the other day about a friend trying to make one of my recipes. She was panicked about trying to pull it off without the right equipment. When she didn’t hear back from me, she kept working on it but she was not happy with the result – blaming her bad cooking skills the whole time. The whole experience confirmed for her that she was a bad cook and should be the kind of parent that buys all baked items wrapped in plastic.

Meanwhile, I was also baking that day. I also had messed up my recipe and ended up with burnt granola. I took one look at it, picked the burnt pieces off the edges, put it in the mason jar and called it roasted granola. The experience did not alter how I felt about my cooking skills or much else.

I have a best friend, I always have. Sometimes I feel a bit childish introducing her as my best friend. But that is what she is.

We used to say that we met when our mother’s bumped pregnant tummies and we have been best friends ever since. We went to primary school and high school together, although I’m still mad that she abandoned me for grades 7 and 8.

We have each other, but we also have separate friendships. Our careers have wildly diverged and yet we still have so much in common. I look back on my childhood and she was part of almost every memorable moment, or she heard about it afterwards. I can’t imagine how people go through life without a best friend, it just would seem so one-dimensional. How would I know what I felt about something until I spent hours talking about it with my BFF?

I lay there on my back with protruding stomach as the ultrasound tech zoomed over the lumps in my belly. “It’s a girl,” he said. “Are you sure?” I asked, knowing that sometimes when they predict a girl it is because of what they don’t see as opposed to what they do see. “There’s the vulva,” he answered.  And my husband, the father of two boys went a little pale.

When my husband and I chose to have a third baby, we just assumed it was going to be a boy. We had two boys  already and we were pretty sure that he was shooting all X chromosomes at that point. But we had a girl.

We didn’t do anything special, I didn’t take supplements, eat sweet food or count the days before and after ovulation. I have to admit that I did check out the Shettles and Whelan strategies for having a girl, but since they are diametrically opposed I figured there was nothing I could do.

So armed with the knowledge of our upcoming bundle of pinkness, we went home in shock and didn’t tell anyone. Anyone who knows me knows that I can not keep a secret but this was fun. Every time someone looked at me they would guess I was having a boy. No matter what old wives' tale they were employing they all came up with boy.

These included: