Maybe I'm wrong, maybe turning tweens into little sexualized women is what consumers want. Because at least once a month a large company who should know better is causing outrage in the media with some wanna-be sexy apparel. There was Giant Tiger with the Playboy undies, Wal-Mart with the makeup, Abercrombie and the push-up bikini and now Skechers has jumped in with their Shape-Ups for seven-year-olds.

There are very few places where I haven't kissed my kids. I love their smoochy deliciousness, drooly and soft, yummy and sweet. My 11-year-old doesn't like mouth kisses, he can hardly abide any kind of kisses anymore but the other two - pucker up, babies!

It is so natural and instinctual for me to literally eat up my kids I never even considered that any parent wouldn't smack one on their kids lips. But blogger Joanna Goddard at A Cup of Jo posted the question last week and was deluged with comments with many saying that they were full mouth kissers, but others saying that they only kissed on the forehead or cheeks.

I met Lorraine at university, and to know Lorraine is to know that she is always passionate about something; that passion settled into helping people in the third world. She travelled, had two kids and then another. We sort of fell out of touch until I got an email from her describing a harrowing cancer diagnosis of multiple myeloma days following the birth of her third child and then a year of hard work - physically and mentally. Perhaps it has happened to you -- someone you are friends with but have fallen out of touch with for no particular reason was diagnosed, or had something happen to them that changes everything; perhaps, it is you. Lorraine wrote her story here:

Days after giving birth to my third child, I was told that I had incurable cancer.

I couldn't even take that in. Though I had never examined it before, I realized that implicit in the decision to have children was the idea that I would be around to help them grow up. Having incurable cancer just seemed ridiculous; I was healthy and did all the right things like eat well and exercise; I had no risk factors. But I guess that's the thing with cancer - you don't ever choose it, it chooses you.

My daughter breastfeeds her dolls. She has even walked down the street with a little doll head tucked in her shirt. After a few minutes she will burp the baby and go on playing.

Is that gross? Does that mean I am raising a pervert?

I don't think so.

My daughter has not turned in one piece of homework this year. Not one. And I am fully supporting her delinquency. She is five. And I guess that means that she is heading for failure.

This isn’t my first foray into homework avoidance. I told my son’s JK teacher that we would not be doing the reading journal. I would not turn reading into homework for a four-year-old. He laughed and called me a slacker mom.

My 5-year-old daughter is dancing to the music and cheering on the singer, Billy Kelly. The kid next to her in a Che Guevera T-shirt with the ironic saying: "I don't even know who this is", is checking out her bag of chips. His dad stands nearby in a plaid shirt and hornrims swaying along - the stereotype of hipster dadness.

This is the kindie music scene at Toronto's Kindiefest (billed as Coachella for kids!).  Dan Zanes and They Might Be Giants may be the first and best-known kindie band, but parents who don't want to trade in their Coachella passes for Wiggles music are sustaining it.

I was a child of the '70s. I grew up in the ethos of the "me decade", a child of divorced but caring parents. They fretted about my marks, came to my concerts, sat through many parent-teacher interviews and drove me to my extracurriculars. It doesn't seem that different on the outside, but my mother and I keep wondering if there was something about parenting that was easier in the '70s.

The Globe and Mail posed this question, and they seem to say, that yes, parenting was easier in the '70s. I think easier may be an overstatement - less stressful is possibly a better term.

The article says that the '70s was a time when the "June Cleaver image of the proper wife was collapsing, but children weren’t yet all-consuming “projects,” doomed for failure if they weren’t read six stories at bedtime."

"Mommy needs some wine" has become shorthand for "Mommy needs a break from these kids that involves adult time and the pretense that I have a life."

Marketers in the U.S. have jumped on the mommification bandwagon and are now producing wine for moms. I would never assume that the wine market could be saturated, but two producers have ended up in court over the term "mommy."

Mother's Day makes me grumpy. Sure, I get to sleep in and my husband tries really hard for a couple of hours - he gets me flowers and breakfast and at least one of my kids is still into it (thanks, honey!). But the rest of the day is spent shuttling between sports events and errands.

But it's not my family that is the problem - it's me. My expectations are the problem. The push-pull of family life; of course I want to be with my family - it's Mother's Day. But I don't really. I want to spend a day hanging out with my girlfriends and my sister but they are all with their families, simultaneously wishing that they were hanging out with me.

Which leads me to what women want for Mother's Day. Here is the secret:

Professional museum curators are probably cleaning and preserving the most famous wedding dress in the world right now. Kate Middleton's lace gown has to last in perpetuity so it can be on display at a museum for young girls to fantasize over, long after my daughter is grown.

Meanwhile, my dress is in a cardboard box, professionally cleaned and folded with a plastic viewing window. It’s kind of creepy really. My mother just forced me to remove it from the back of her closet and place it into the back of my own.

My 5-year-old daughter wanted to rub her grubby hands all over it, but I was wary of pulling it out of its chemical shrine. I’m not sure what I’m waiting for. I know that she won’t wear it for her big day but for some reason I can’t take it out of the box and disturb all the memories and hopes that lie there with it.