So Giant Tiger is apologizing for placing Playboy-themed thongs and other apparel in the back-to-school section of their flyer. The bunny undies are considered Junior and are going for a steal at $5.97.

They did not mean to imply that kids under the age of 18 would want to be a “junior bunny” sporting bunny-clad hipsters, thongs, or “passion spray” for their pillow. It was a mistake and the national chain will refrain from putting Playboy merchandise in future flyers. But if there's an urge to be part of Hugh Hefner’s bunny army, you can head down to the discount retailer and still pick them up at the store.

Click to see the ad:

When I saw this gallery of funny baby pictures I immediately thought, I want to add to that. But when I started going through my pictures and I didn’t laugh, I felt sad. I miss those chubby little faces, the tiny fingers, the cute voices and the years gone by. When I look at the photos I can see clues of what they are going to look like and glimpses of their smiles. But I miss those little babies that are gone forever, their images locked in their goofy images.

To top it off I couldn’t even find that many funny pictures. But I since I don’t post pictures of my kids too often, I thought I would add in some of the amusing ones of my three little ones. Now I am off to weep somewhere quiet.

Homework never ends. Every day, there is more and more, everyday there is stress and needs and missing pencils and complicated French words and higher math. And that’s just in grade two.

Homework duties are weighed down by fears of future failure and incompetence. A common thought is: if my son doesn’t finish his math homework today he will miss out on the next big concept which will mean he will not understand anything that happens in grade five and then in high school he will drop math, he will not get into university and he will be pulling caramel macchiatos until he gets repetitive strain and is unable to work at all.

Can someone explain to me why my daughter loves Justin Bieber?

Put aside his talent, or lack of, for a minute. Why does a four-year-old girl love Justin Bieber so much that she yells at the top of her lungs every time she sees or hears him: “I LOVE JUSTIN BIEBER!!”

Is there some kind of secret message in his songs or his mousey brown locks that only four-year-old girls can decipher? (A similar message may be contained in Cinderella’s skirt, but I digress.)

I let my 7-year old walk to school with his buddies, without a parent, everyday.

There I have said it.

Fill up my comments with how I am endangering my child. But before you do. Think, why are we so afraid of our kids walking to school alone?

Sometimes you read an article that is supposed to help you lower your stress by finding ways to function better—at least that is the title of the article but as you read it you start to get a sneaking suspicion that the point is actually to increase  your stress so that you keep reading the magazine for solutions.

Which is exactly what happened when I read this Redbook article. Researchers spied on 32 families for four days to figure out how families with two working parents and two kids function. And then they came up with some guidelines on how the low-stress families (read: happier) families did it.

The researchers distilled the findings into some commonalities between the low-stress families. When reading over the Seven Secrets of Low-Stress Families it is hard not to compare yourself to their functional examples and of course you come up short. Here are the findings compared to my family:

The things that parenting teaches your are often instinctual, private and beyond recognition of most parenting books. They are deeply private and sometimes, as you lose your cool on the street corner, very public.

All parents have a different list of the lessons learned by actively parenting, usually those lists contain the serious and the sweet, the highs and the lows. Here's my list, and if I was to write this list tomorrow it would be totally different because parenting is like that.

I have witnessed the fierceness of friends trying to overcome infertility; the willing to give up time, money and their sense of self to bear a child.

I have mourned when they come up with nothing and been happy when the line went pink. But I do not know what it is like to be disappointed month after month after being told what a natural process it is.

I am sure that I have said the wrong thing, fell into clichés and been insensitive.

The images are arresting, the colours jump, the expression on the faces are deadpan and the photos are meticulously detailed, but do they cross the line? Photographer Jonathan Hobin places children in meticulously staged vignettes of media saturated events such as Abu Ghraib and the Jon Benet Ramsay disappearance.

His message is that kids can not be shielded from the news and the playroom becomes a space where they actively engage with the images and messages of current events and media.

Imagine this: you get an invitation to a gender party from an expecting couple. It is a gender-neutral colour and invites you to a shindig where the sex of their impending bundle will be announced in a surprising (and often sweet) way.

You may learn the sex of the baby by biting into a heavily iced cake to reveal a colour on the inside. When the colour is revealed everyone will jump up and down with excitement and exclaim why that is the best sex.