I have an 11-year-old which means that I am a walking, talking embarrassment to him. Unless, he wants something - then I am okay to hang out with.

I can embarrass him by touching him in public, joking around with his friends, singing along to the radio, taking pictures of him swimming with no shirt on, taking pictures of him generally but my worst offense is when I try to be cool.

I have two kids in French Immersion but I have always had an uneasy feeling about the program. I think the classroom time is often boring, the lessons are full of rote learning and the curriculum does not allow for any creative, tangential learning.

This is not always true, of course. But overall the time it takes to teach kids a second language eats up the time that can be used for more fun methods of teaching. For instance, in kindergarten and grade one, the teachers are busy teaching the kids the alphabet and how to count, they are teaching the word chat for cat, instead of teaching them that cats are nocturnal, and have bumpy tongues to sip milk, and are disdainful of their owners.

What do you say when words are not enough? What do you tell your child about people being shot just because of where they were? What do you say about teens dying at a camp? It is so hard to say the right things to kids who need words, not silence, when they are scared or feeling anxious because the world seems to be going crazy.

When I am talking to my kids about tragedies I try and always keep in mind that their fears are self-centred and will revolve around their own sense of safety. I try and keep these points in mind from a post I wrote on talking about Haiti, but when confronted with a tragedy that has a madmen at the centre I feel a bit of a loss for words. So I turned to an expert and asked Alyson Schafer, parenting expert and author of Ain’t Misbehaving, about how to handle this kind of situation.

I held that one-day old baby in my arms and I thought: she is so yummy. I would love to snuggle with a little one of these for a while and enjoy the newness of it all. And then give her back.

I am done having kids. Three is enough for me, four would be my tipping point. (Three may be my tipping point, some days one is more than enough.)

I have to admit that when I heard that Julie Cole had six kids, I couldn't believe it. Not only is she co-founder of the wildly successful Mabel's Labels but six kids? Who in their right mind would choose to have six kids I wondered. And just like everyone else she knows, I asked her. Her answer made sense (for her, not so much for me) and so I asked her to write it all down.

Six Reasons to Have Six Kids
When people hear that I have six kids, the reaction is usually entertaining. Sure there are some days when I wonder what I’ve got myself into, worry about the world they’ll inherit and consider the environmental footprint of a family like mine. But most of the time I just celebrate how awesome it is to have six kids. Here are a few reasons why!

I was sitting in the doctor's office, nursing my third child while my doctor was asking me pointed questions about my complaint:

"Give me an example of what you are talking about."

Everyone wants to take pictures of their kids that shows them for who they really are and freezes that one moment in time. But few of us manage it. When I take photos of my three, one of them usually ends up looking horrible. Since summer is key picture taking time, I asked fellow Bad Moms Club member Angella Dykstra to help me out with some pointers. Angella’s blogs: Dutch Blitz and her photography site are always filled with memorable photos of her kids and perfectly illustrate what I would love to achieve with my photos.

Guest Post: Taking Photos of Your Kids Is Easier Than You Think

I often have friends tell me that they love the photos that I take of my kids  (Thank you!) and some of them follow it with a statement that they wish they could take good photos of their own kids. If only they had bigger and better equipment, maybe they could capture great photos of their own kids. I'm here to tell you that (camera) size doesn't matter.

Erica Jong’s name may ring a bell. She wrote Fear of Flying in 1973 and put into words what many women of the '60s were thinking about the stifling stereotypes of being a ‘good wife and mother’.

Recently, Jong has been making news for taking on this generation of mothers, admonishing us for losing ourselves in motherhood. In the Wall Street Journal last year, she wrote how attachment parenting was imprisoning women in motherhood and coined the term: "motherphilia".

My boys are both circumcised. It was not a decision that we took lightly.

Circumcision rates have fallen sharply in Canada, even in the last decade going from the norm to the exception. But we are a Jewish family and not circumcising them would have meant that they are not Jewish. 

Did you line up to see Harry Potter this weekend? Did you cower at Voldemort? Cry at the end? Revel in all things Potter?

Harry is like a member of our family. We even discussed naming our puppy Sirius or Patronus after a character and a protection spell. (We settled on Joey for no reason other than that it is what we came with.)

My husband read each book to my now 11-year-old. The two of them lined up at midnight for the last book to be released. They have been part of a cultural moment that I don’t know will ever happen again. It was a journey they took together and I love J.K. Rowling for that gift. In fact, that reason alone has made me a Harry Potter fan for life.