We lived in the U.S. when I had my first child. My job offered me a whole six weeks off - unpaid of course. I knew that wasn't going to be enough, so I was planning to quit. Bedrest and corporate takeover stymied my plan for a long feminist diatribe; an email had to do.

I think maternity leave differences between the U.S. and Canada are one of the biggest things that set us apart. The one year Canadian maternity leave forces companies and individuals to recognize that bonding with your baby is important. By holding a job open, it also forces employers to recognize that women's roles in the workplace are important.

Another Valentine's Day has come to an end. The paper bags, homemade boxes and piles of red and pink paper are littering your house and your kids are happy, tired, slightly grumpy and definitely having some sugar highs and lows.

How was it for you? And for your kids?

I really hate how muchI have become a broken record, I say things without thinking and as soon as it is out of my mouth, I am tired of hearing it too.

We all do it. We repeat the same phrase over and over, and for some reason we expect the kids to respond. But they don't hear us - they hear the teacher's voice from Charlie Brown instead. Even I hear it when I'm talking sometimes.

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.

A friend told me that her husband volunteered in a Junior Kindgergarten class and some of the kids didn't know how to feed themselves.

Isn't that sad? For the kids and their caregivers, who have spent hours spooning food into their mouths? It isn't just sad, but it is bad for the kids - it is even bad for babies.

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?

A preschooler swearing on TV? Oh, my heavens!

But it happened last week and the world did not end. Toddlers did not walk around dropping F-bombs from the top of the slide, preschoolers did not turn to their mothers with a forked tongue. Society just kept creakily moving along.

Last Wednesday, Modern Family aired an episode called "Little Bo Bleep!" in which three-year-old Lily starts sprinkling some F-bombs around, even during her starring role as a flower girl.

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.

Do you remember when "mom" was just what you called the woman who gave birth to you? (Mum, in my case.)

Now the word "mom" is a whole marketing strategy. The momification of every sector from business to fashion and entertainment to blogging is ongoing. There doesn't seem to be an area that can't be mommified. And I say this as a writer who is proud to be called a Mom Blogger (said with only slight sarcastic intonation).

You know that mommydom is trendy when even the celebrities are pulling out their mom card whenever they can. From their baby bump to getting their body back, a celebrity mom gets extra media attention, more tabloid shots and possibly extra sympathy from the cultural group known as "moms".