Labour. In retrospect it is a pretty awesome thing. But it takes a long time to get there; very often the memories of your labour and delivery carry some emotional weight that only time and distance can take care of.

For many women pregnancy is the first lesson in giving up control, and labour, labour is like the next 50, (parenting is when you realize control is a myth).

There are lots of great articles with tips out there. And you can you spend hours planning the minutia of your birth plan. But it won't help. Because no birth goes according to a birth plan. Here are my biased, but realistic tips that will get you through it.

The debate over special accommodation for peanut allergies has gotten ugly at a Florida school. Parents at a school in Edgewater, Florida are asking that a 6-year-old with a life-threatening peanut allergy be homeschooled so their children don't have to deal with the rules to protect her.

I'm sure the story is more complicated than it seems, but it plays ugly in the media. The grade one student is severely allergic to nuts and to minimize her exposure, the school insisted that her classmates wash their hands and rinse out their mouths twice a day. (The horrors!) The Board allegedly sent in a police dog to sniff out nut remains over March Break.

I am a stay-at-home (the annoying-sounding SAHM) mom. Or maybe I am a work-at-home mom (the pretentious-sounding WAHM), or maybe I am somewhere in the middle, but it works for me.

It's not an ideological thing with me, it is just how it worked out. My best friend since childhood is a doctor, the exact opposite of my free-floating lifestyle and that works for her. We don't feel any competition over our choices. It is just how it is.

Keep reading to see some of the funny/offensive things people have said to me over the years...

I have never looked at an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue, nor have I ever bought any of their clothes. But I'm sure they don't really care that a middle-aged mother ignores their presence in the marketplace, since what they are after is my little girl.

But why would they choose to piss off mothers everywhere and advertise a "push-up" bathing suit for 7-year-olds? Or maybe, as Peggy Orenstein said, they want to upset the parents and increase their own street cred?

There were so many heartbreaking comments on my Do You Love One Child More? post. Many were from people who felt that not only were they not the favourite, but they were the "black sheep" (for lack of a better term) of the family. The experience of watching a sibling be the "chosen one" had made some feel unlovable, others felt the need to prove their parent wrong by succeeding and others had cut off ties with their family.

My mother called me up about a year ago and told me that she had gone to get some liquor at the back of the liquor cabinet for a recipe and it was really watery. I laughed and laughed, did I, or one of my siblings water down that bottle so very long ago? Probably.

Now, I realize that is probably not the best anecdote to start a discussion about responsible teen drinking at home, but despite veering into the production of the occasional jungle juice, I was a responsible drinker as a teen (and still am). And I have my parents to thank for building a trusting relationship around alcohol by showing us what responsible drinking looked and tasted like.

We continue that trend in our own home.

On our oldest kid's 11th birthday, we showed all of our kids a video of when he was a baby. And they kept focusing on one thing: Dad, is that a giant phone on your belt? That is a cellphone? Why is it so big? Why won't it fit in your pocket?

This lead to a discussion of how things have changed in the last decade and many questions about how we survived without cellphones and texting. (How did we?)

My kids have also been amazed with pay phones (why would anyone need that?); the idea of tapes (you had to flip them over?); typewriters (no memory??); and car windows that needed to be rolled down.

You know those thoughts that haunt you in the middle of the night about your kids? Well one blogger went public with hers at Babble last week and lit up the momosphere. Kate Tietje wrote: Mom Confession: I think I love my son a little bit more. In it she describes how she prefers her 20-month-old son to her 3-year-old daughter. She writes:

I can’t be the only one out there who feels this way, though. Because moms aren’t perfect. Maybe we pretend that we are in front of other moms, lest we be judged for our failings. But we do all have them. And so…I’ve taken a deep breath, and I’m going to share.

Ceri Marsh spent a decade editing fashion magazines, including eight years as editor-in-chief of Fashion Magazine. She left her editor position after having her second child. Now she is chief cook and bottle-washer at Sweet Potato Chronicles, a sweet site about the ups and downs of feeding a family. She took time off from recipe testing to reflect on her role as a fashion editor...

I spent a recent evening indulging in a rare pleasure: a whole, quiet, post-kids’-bedtime hour consuming a fashion magazine. Heaven. The April issue of Vogue is their annual Shape Issue. I’ve been reading Vogue since I had the babysitting money to start buying copies at thirteen, but on that evening I thought, “What shapes, exactly?” Of course cover girl Rihanna is lusciously curvy and all the more beautiful for it. But other than Ri-Ri and a story on the Olsen twins (Short! Not model tall!), every image is of a super tall and super thin model. Super eye roll.

Before you shake your head and say that the creators of fashion magazines are at best nuts and at worst going to hell for making women hate their bodies – wait. Because until a year ago, I was one of them. For ten years I worked at a fashion magazine, eight of those as editor-in-chief. I didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, I made the Kool-Aid. Buckets of it. 

Have you seen Rango yet?

We haven't, so I shouldn't really comment on it... but here I go.

There was an article in the Globe and Mail that detailed a controversy over the smoking in the animated kids' flick. Seems that some supporting and ugly characters smoke in the movie and that has raised the ire of some parents and the pediatrics associations in North America.