Is there a parent in the world who hasn't agonized, discussed, cried and lost their mind over the sleep issue? I don't think so.

For the first few years of a kid's life, sleep dominates most conversations, thoughts and desires. But I can tell you, parents who are in the midst of the sleep panic, that it does go away. Kids do learn to sleep, or at least you learn to function with night visitors, disturbed sleep and chronic tiredness.

I do believe that different kids have different sleep temperaments to an extent. But the biggest determinator of your kids' sleep patterns is you, the parent. 

Kids at a small Cambridge elementary school will not be putting on their costumes today because their school has banned dressing up. The kids are encouraged to wear orange and black in a show of respect for the many kids of diverse backgrounds.

According to the Principal at Saginaw Public School, they banned costumes because some kids were going home before the parade, some costumes were violent, and some families don't participate in Halloween at all.

The storm panic hit my No Frills early this morning and there was a run on bottled water, Halloween candy and Decadent chocolate chip cookies.

Even by 11 a.m. the line-ups were long and I was totally humiliated to be buying a two-litre jug of water as the law in our house is no bottled water! But my husband was insistent that we had some and we decided that filling up the bathtub was one step too far into paranoia.

As an adult, it is scary -- I can only imagine how all this talk of hurricanes and Frankenstorm feels to kids. What is the appropriate level of anxiety in response to all this "storm porn"?

As a parent, you see birth order from both sides --the way you experienced it, and the way you see it reflected in your own kids. 

First borns are responsible, middles have a chip on their shoulder and the babies are irresponsible -- you have probably heard it all before. But do you believe it?

Five days until D-day, or should I say H-day. 

Do you have your costumes ready? Not just yours, but the kids as well? Did you take the day off, or at least book off early, or schedule a long lunch so you can see the lame Halloween parade? Every year my BFF swears at me: When did Halloween become a national holiday?

An expensive, messy, sugary national holiday?

Much hullabaloo has been made about girls hitting puberty earlier without a word said about the boys. That changed when a recent study says that yes, boys are also reaching puberty sooner than in the past, some almost two years earlier than what was considered average.

It is easy to chart the onset of puberty with girls because the start of menstruation is easy to document. Researchers use testicle size to figure out when puberty starts in boys (I can't imagine how they can find test subjects for that.) They have found that boys are getting larger testes and bigger penises at a younger age (mothers of tweens refer to that as "man penis" and now I go off and cry).

It seems like a no-brainer -- if girls are hitting puberty younger than obviously boys should be as well. But some of the accepted explanations for girls' early maturation has been the increased amount of estrogen that girls are exposed to through their environment and obesity. An increase in estrogen should, theoretically, be slowing down puberty in boys.

But it's not.

I live in a community, a tight-knit community that looks after one another. I think that is the thing that surprises people the most about my life in the urban core of a big city. 

People from outside of the city sometimes assume that people who live in Toronto lead busy lives and don't know their neighbours. But nothing could be further from the truth -- at least where I live.

There was a lovely piece in the Globe and Mail written by a woman who moved here with her son. She hid from the other mothers for months, afraid that her bad English would turn them off. But what she found is that the other mothers were watching out for her son and there was a community there the whole time -- she just had to look for it.

Rosalind Arusha Arkadina Altalune Florence Thurman-Busson

That is not a class list, nor is it the name of the newest septuplets born to some status-seeker, it is the rather large moniker of Uma Thurman and Arpad Busson's three-month-old baby girl. 

When I close my eyes I can still remember the exact feeling of my head the day after my braces were tightened. Or the scraped feeling on the inside of my lips.

I had the full complement of orthodontic wear -- braces, elastics, and the medieval torture device known as a head gear. And I still have an over-bite to show for it.

So it is with trepidation that I re-enter that world with my son. And the bad news is that some things stay the same -- it's still brute force moving the teeth. And the good news is that some things change -- orthodontists are nice now (or at least ours is) and technology has helped refine treatment.

I have never known a parent to rejoice in labelling their child with ADHD/ADD. Sometimes a diagnosis comes with relief because there are (limited) options and programs out there to help kids with ADHD. 

But with attention deficit at the forefront, teachers, schools, doctors and even parents may be jumping to diagnose something that may in fact be something else - like anxiety or a learning disability. Or just immaturity.