We have had a nightly visitor this week. She crawl into our bed, settle between us and says sleepily: "I"ve had a bad dream."

I can live with that part (in fact, I enjoy it). The problem is when I put her to bed, she says that as soon as she closes her eyes she can see the monster of her dreams waiting to come get her.

I feel like I am seeing more and more toddlers on leashes these days. And I have to admit that I have a visceral reaction to seeing a child harnessed to their parent like a pet.

It's true, I tend to give the parent the cut eye for the parenting fail. But when I started to research this post, I'll admit, I had a small change of heart.

My friend Theresa Albert, who is creator of the fabulous My Friend in Food (go check, then come back), has a teen and seems to have a pretty good sense of the teen world. In fact, she is the one I pester when I have questions about what is in my future. But in this guest post she is confronted with a situation that she didn't know how to handle, and is still wishing that she had done it differently.

Guest Post: What would you do?

It was just lying in the grass. A shiny Blackberry so I picked it up with some do-gooding on my mind.

What do you do when you find a phone in front of your house?  We wished to return it but struggled with the moral reality of having to invade privacy to figure out whose it was.  I know I would accept a stranger poking around if it meant the return of this expensive piece of equipment (containing more personal details than I want to think about). So in we went.

Stress can be felt in so many ways. It hits you physically and mentally. It can affect your sleep, your health, sex life and your parenting and definitely cause breakouts.

But why is being a mom so stressful? Is it the time crunch? the feeling of never being on top of things? The many different things that need to be done in a day, all at the same time? Why is modern parenting so stressful? And what can we do about it?

Gwenyth Paltrow. I find it possible to love her and hate her in the same minute. She is so annoyingly perfect and smug and yet has moments of realness.

But this post isn't really about her. It is about an issue that she brought up in a recent article in Harper's Bazaar in which she mentions bathtime in her house.

Yesterday, I wrote a general post on Facebook and why I am leaning toward allowing my son on to the site even though he is under the age limit of 13.

But Facebook is such a huge, huge topic that I felt like I missed some things about how to handle the site itself.

My son is almost 12, he is in Grade 6, and he tells me often that he is the only kid in his year that does not have a Facebook account.

He has one year to go to legally join the site, but we are leaning towards letting him lie and join a year early. It doesn't feel good but I do know that most of his friends have an account and I would rather that he joined while I still had some influence over him, than have him join without me knowing. Because that is what kids do.

If you don't believe me ask the Vice-Principal of your local middle school; they will tell you that all the grade sevens have an account, but many parents don't know it.

In case you haven't heard, Cindy Crawford's daughter is the new face of Young Versace.

My first thoughts were: Who buys Versace for their kids? And who cares?

But also, why? It's not like that Crawford-Gerber family is in need of money. Putting their child's face in a magazine is about the chasing of fame, pure and simple.

Their beautiful 8-year-old daughter wants to model and they made it happen. And I don't get it.

This wasn't the post I was planing to write tonight, but given the night I've had it is what I have come up with.

My 11-year-old son was in a funk and feeling cranky and down. He was lying on my bed when he did a funny, jerky head move and banged his head on the corner of my bedside table.

It obviously hurt and I went over to check out the situation and as I was soothing him, I noticed blood - never a good thing.

The world is divided into male and female. The toy stores want us to know it, the toy manufacturers want us to know it and, often, the comments here on this blog want me to know it.

But once in a while a kid will tiptoe over the line, sometimes with intent, with curiosity and sometimes just because sparkly, purple things are nice to look at.