I just came across an article* that made me very happy. Because who doesn't enjoy being right?


A strange thing seems to bind many nutritional rebels and the line-towers together: a belief that food cravings either don't mean anything or, even worse, are a sign of our unhealthy "addiction" to something bad or toxic (e.g., salt, sugar, saturated fats, etc.). As a good little skeptical biologist, this always seemed a bizarre assumption to me. Why would evolution have favoured these incredibly strong impulses (i.e., instincts) if they served only to make us harm ourselves? I'll admit I haven't conducted exhaustive research on the subject but I'm pretty sure that instincts are generally aimed at self-preservation and not self-destruction. Even the old belief about lemming mass-suicide has proven incorrect (though it still makes for a fun game).

As such, I've always found it demeaning that pregnant women and their "crazy" cravings are so mocked and treated with dismissive condescension. This article is the first time I've read something interesting and scientific that supports my crazy notion that maybe, just maybe, our bodies actually know what they need. It also happens to be particularly interesting to me because one of the few things I really wanted to eat when I was first pregnant was steak. The rarer the better. I enjoy steak at any time but for the first trimester of my pregnancy, eating steak was a compulsion. I didn't crave it so much as I felt that I (and the tiny parasite I've come to love and call my daughter) needed it.

And apparently I was right: sweet delicious Vitamin B12


*Note: Just do yourself a favour and ignore the final moronic comment from the vegan-biased "nutritionist", there's plenty of evidence that stat fats are good for you and even more that B12 (a vitamin not available from a vegan diet) is necessary for healthy moms and babes).

Last night we had a particularly beautiful parenting-fail.


At about 7pm, right after dinner and a bath for the kid, we decided to make a quick run across town to a friend's house to drop off some things we had for her. So we grabbed the kid, bundled her into the car and took off, braving the inevitably delayed bedtime that would be the result of a late car-induced nap.

We arrived and spent a few minutes having a cup of tea and a short visit. About 10 minutes after we got there, I noticed that one side of the kid's pants had a wet patch in the back about mid-butt height. Knowing my daughter's penchant for such things, I assumed that she'd been playing with the dog's water and gotten a bit wet. We were leaving shortly so I figured she'd be ok until we got home.

We continued our visit and a few minutes later I noticed that the wet patch seemed to be growing at a disturbingly rapid pace. It now encompassed most of her butt and was spreading down her legs.

And then I remembered the bath.

Since she could first sit up and really enjoy a bath, the kid has also taken great pleasure in drinking her own body weight in bath water. In fact, it may be the part she looks forward to most about bath time. Her impressive bladder has defeated many superb cloth diapers on a normal day. Add in a tubby and that diaper didn't stand a chance. It wasn't just leaking, it had fairly exploded with liquid. It was quite incredible to behold actually.

And then I remembered we didn't bring the diaper bag.

Such a quick trip we'd thought. Why would we need it? Cue the inevitable epic diaper disaster.

Luckily my friend is an experienced parent and very creative. In a few short minutes, while my husband and I remained quasi-stunned by the immensity of our own stupidity, she gathered a plastic grocery bag, a maxi-pad and an old swimsuit of her daughter's. She handed them to me so I could McGyver a temporary diaper for my kid. We borrowed a spare pair of jammies and made a hasty exit with our shame and our plastic-bagged child.

At least my daughter will never have to search for things to talk about in therapy.

Occasionally I get a complete music-boner for a particular song.


I'll listen to it at least 3-4 times a day. Very often singing along loudly, with or without the right words. It probably drives my husband nuts but he's sweet so, if it does make him mental, he doesn't complain.

I've noticed that often the songs that really grab me are great male-female duets. When a duet really works, there's just something so perfect and brilliant about two contrasting voices singing the same song. Let's not talk about bad duets though. They are the stuff of nightmares really.

Lately, I've been all about The Civil Wars. Pretty much any damn song they do is genius but in particular, "I've Got This Friend" is as about as perfect as a song can get. I've literally been walking to work singing that song out loud like a crazy person because I can't help myself. Take a few minutes and listen to that. Then listen to it again and tell me you don't want to sing along. If you don't like that song, I don't think we can be friends.

Ok, for those of you who did enjoy that song, I have a couple more endorsements from my "duets I'm obsessed with" playlist:

• Ben Folds and Regina Spektor "You Don't Know Me"
• Liam Frost and Martha Wainwright "Your Hand in Mine" (shocking because normally I can't stand Martha)
• Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris "I Will Remember You" (sorry, can't find a damned link, it's on his brilliant album "Jerusalem": do check it out)
• Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros "Home"
• Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova "Falling Slowly" (hell, anything with these two from the "Once" soundtrack or their band Swell Season)

Ok, I'll cut myself off there.

I'd be delighted if anyone had any other suggestions for duets I can use to feed my addiction. And torture my poor husband with my lame vocal stylings.

A morning glimpse of a "child's moon".


I'm not often given to bursts of poetic expression but I've always loved that term for a moon you can see during the day.

"In the next room, Oscar is still raging, red-faced and impotently furious that his cock has been wrapped up and hidden from his grasping little hands. Furthermore, he is outraged that his mother is wearing a teatowel as a wimple, and that both his parents are addressing sausages with such levity at his time of cockless angst. "WAAAAAA," he shouts, while Esme leaps around him, trying to soothe his fury with a series of leaps, shrieks and FFRRZZT! noises that only serve to piss him off more. BANG! PPRRRPFTZ! BANG! SQQUUURTFZ! BANG! WAAAAAAAA!

Ian and I look at the children, then at each other. We stop being Inspector Clouseau.

"That's the sound of our love for each other," I say, removing my wimple, as we gaze upon our progeny. "Our love, our mutual attraction; there it is, manifest in human form. That is its voice. That is the sound of our love."" ~ Whoopee

A brilliant woman I can always count on to give me the full-body laugh I need.

And also to remind me that I can hold-off having another kid for a bit longer.

Ignore the snow flying by, it's officially Spring!!!!

Recently I've noticed another side-effect of cutting out the grains: I have abs.


Not like "I'm going to start wearing crop-tops to work" abs but definitely visible muscle-like shapes located in the vicinity of my stomach area. Peaking out from the safety of a layer of almond-flour cupcake insulation.

I hadn't started exercising more or doing anything else differently. I haven't even lost any weight that I've noticed (I don't own a scale but my pants still fit the same). And yet, there they are. I'm pretty sure they were there before but perhaps they were hiding, afraid to come out and be put to use.

And they should be afraid. Because now that I've spotted them, I want to use them more.

I've never been really overweight but I've also never been close to anyone's example of a prime physical specimen so maybe this is what people who lose weight or get buff talk about when they feel encouraged by seeing results. All I know is that now I find myself starting to do weird things occasionally like push-ups and throwing random bouts of mad-dash sprinting into my runs (I like to pretend a bear is chasing me just to keep things really "paleo"). And I want to do more: rock climbing, trail running, jiu-jitsu, swimming, biathlons, etc.

However, one thing for certain is that I'm not particularly interested in starting to define myself as an athlete. I actually find it quite funny that there's a whole branch of the paleo diet devoted to athletes. Perhaps I should write a book devoted to how to "do" paleo when you're an average, 32 year-old, breastfeeding, sporadically-energetic, cubicle-dwelling, Caucasian woman.

It just seems silly to me that, if you're still just using your body for what it's intended to do, you'd need much more advice than: if you're using-up more calories (be it through nursing or exercise), you may need to eat more, when you're hungry, eat mostly meat and veggies.

Oh, look at me, I'm so pithy I could be the paleo version of Michael Pollan.

Last night my able baking assistant helped me whip-up some grain-free cupcakes for today's office St. Patrick's celebration (sadly, it does not seem that it will involve any booze).

I tweaked a brilliantly-simple recipe from Roost to just be a plain vanilla cupcake:

3 cups almond flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup coconut oil (melted)
1/2 cup honey
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs

Preheat oven to 325F. Combine dry ingredients. Combine wet ingredients in a separate bowl. Mix dry and wet until well incorporated. Line a muffin tin with 10-12 cupcake liners and pour batter in each cup. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown. When cool, slap on the icing of your choice (I went with vanilla and green sugar).

Due to the almond flour they have a bit of a cornmeal consistency but I still endorse them wholeheartedly. And I take my desserts very seriously. So does my assistant.

Some of my clearest early childhood memories involve watching TV.


When I was really little, my mom and I lived in a cabin without electricity, so obviously not then.

But later, after we'd moved into the city and my brothers were born, around when I would have been about 4, I have lots of memories of Sesame Street, Mr. Dress-Up, Mr. Rogers, The Friendly Giant, old Spiderman cartoons, Scooby-Doo, vintage Lone Ranger, etc. My mom was dealing with my step-brother and newborn twins so it's not shocking she would have taken full-advantage of being able to plunk me down and give me something to keep me busy for a while. When I got older we didn't watch a ton of TV because it just wasn't available: we moved back to the woods and my parents refused to get a satellite dish. They didn't vilify TV, it just wasn't a priority.

I've babysat kids with a range of parental approaches to TV. One kid wasn't allowed to watch any TV other than National Film Board productions. I used to bring Disney VHS movies with me whenever I took care of her, mostly because I couldn't stand to have to watch the stuff her parents approved of. Another family I babysat for with three kids, let them watch anything they wanted. As a teenager, even I cringed when the baby toddled by as the older kids watched the Terminator movies. The three year old was also amazingly proficient at playing Duke Nukem on their computer. I hope he's not in jail now.

Before you become a parent, you naturally have ideas about how you'll approach raising your own kids. I fully expected these ideas to be challenged once I actually had kids. And not just because so many many people felt compelled to tell me that I would. However, I figured that with respect to TV, it was fairly reasonable to assume that not much would change from before we had kids: I like some TV but there's not enough to interest me that I'm willing to pay high cable fees. We mostly occasionally watched DVDs of TV shows. Also, I think too much TV for anyone is a bad idea and I think it's safe to assume that for developing brains it might be even worse.

And I was right: we still don't watch much TV and I'm still not willing to pay for cable.

However, I think now that the factor that I failed to fully appreciate was the presence of other, better technology in our house. It's mind-blowing just how quickly kids grasp the purpose of technology and are attracted to it. It's incredibly clear when watching children that humans have evolved as tool-using animals. The TV she could care less about, however, my iPhone is a very different story.

I don't actually remember the first time she got a hold of it but we've only had them since late August/early September. She was all over it right away like white-on-rice. Cookie Monster on Youtube? Will.I.Am's Sesame Street music video? LIKE CRACK FOR BABIES. She also loves seeing pictures and videos of herself. She's actually taken to pointing at the phone and saying "baby". As in: "hand me that thing, I want to look at the pictures of that gorgeous baby you keep on there". And, I've willingly paid $2.99 for an app called "PeekABoo Barn" featuring everyone's favourite farm animals and their noises. That app alone has more than paid for itself with the precious few minutes of quiet it has bought me.

So now I'm trying to decide whether I still get to be smug with all those people who said I'd cave and order the Treehouse channel in a moment of parenting desperation. Since, while my kid doesn't get much TV screentime, we're currently in the market for a cheap used iTouch so I can reclaim my damn phone.

Ya, I'm thinking I should probably just shut up. And try not to feel too compelled to tell people who say they would never hand something so expensive to a child: "just you wait until after the baby is born"...

Links following a news story I read about a 23 year old grandmother:


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I'll admit that I clicked on the one about black and white twins. Who could resist that?

One of the greatest things that my husband has ever given me was the idea to use our iPhones to take pictures of the grocery list.


I cannot possibly overstate the brilliance of this simple, yet paradigm-shifting, idea.

No more paper lists dropped or lost or forgotten. I forget to take a picture before I leave the house and he can just send me one. There are a ton of grocery apps but this idea blows them all out of the water.

Also, is that not an amazing list? You so want to come to my house for dinner. We definitely know how to party. Of course, I note that someone forgot to write "whisky" down.

"The only thing currently missing from my life is the absence of panics, from, say, finding a gigantic snake in my library, or watching the economist Myron Scholes, armed to the teeth, walk into my bedroom in the middle of the night. I lack what the biologist Robert Sapolsky calls the beneficial aspect of acute stress, compared to the deleterious one of dull stress --another barbell in which no stress plus a little bit of extreme stress is vastly better than a little bit of stress (like mortgage worries) all the time." ~ Nassim Taleb, "Why I Walk" (via Robb Wolf)


This quote articulates the basis of my running half-joking-half-serious argument that many modern mental health issues could be resolved by the occasional run-in with a large predatory animal (predators other than our fellow humans that is: going to a singles bar doesn't count).

It's a matter of perspective really. Our giant complex brains evolved to operate in an environment of ever-changing stimuli and stressors: hunger, extremes of temperature, pain, pleasure, panic, satiation, security, etc. Now, for good and for bad, these beautiful brains have also allowed us to create environments that insulate us from many of these "negative" stimuli.

In the middle of a nasty (typical) Northern winter, we wake up in a warm bed in a secure house. We take hot showers. We grab fresh food from our refrigerators and eat breakfast whenever we wish, mostly in the absence of hunger. We put on warm coats to climb into our cars parked in heated garages attached to our houses. We drive to work and park in indoor parking lots, taking elevators to our offices. We drive to the gym to exercise on machines designed to provide a controlled, consistent "workout". We drive home, eat dinner, watch TV and climb back into our beds.

Unfortunately, by being smart enough to free ourselves from experiencing un-comforts, we've also lost much of our perspective. How can you experience being well-fed if you've never been truly hungry? How can you really appreciate the warmth of summer if you never went outside during the dead of winter?

We've also traded the occasional major stressor for constant minor ones: the car payment, the mortgage payment, extracurricular sports and classes for the kids, bickering with the neighbours about parking spots, the price of gas, long lines at the grocery store, etc. We obsess and nitpick and grumble constantly. Very few of us ever seem to experience contentment.

I'm definitely not going to argue that life prior to the development of modern comforts was a beautiful Utopian Eden. Hell, I go tent camping regularly partly just to remind myself that I pay a mortgage so I can have hot showers and no bugs in my bed in the morning. And that's the point really, if we occasionally force ourselves to experience some discomfort and variability, we tend to appreciate the absence of discomfort and the soothing presence of consistency a bit more.

At least that's the philosophy I'm trying to embrace as I attempt to convince myself that I should get off my butt and go outside for a run.

However, after being up all night with a screaming teething baby (for the third night in a row), perhaps I've already filled my un-comfort quota for this week. As sweet and mellow as my kid normally is, this recent spate of teething has turned her into a pretty good stunt double for a sabre-toothed tiger. I don't think I'll have any issues appreciating the next solid two hour chunk of sleep I get. Perspective really is everything it seems.

Given all the recent news about the high levels of depression in the public service, this may be the most brilliant marketing strategy I've ever seen.

It seems that "winter" is behind us already. Can spring be far?

A few things that I've learned in the last 18 months:

1. In all things "baby", embrace the parenting path of least resistance.
2. It's a fallacy that you need uninterrupted sleep to function. Existing as someones' all-night smorgasboob o' snacks and comfort, while not necessarily a personal ideal, is actually much easier than it would seem at first.
3. Although some nights of co-sleeping (or not sleeping rather) suck massively, you can be fairly sure that for the most part it's still the easiest way for everyone to get (most of) the sleep (and food) they need.
4. There are only a few big-ticket items worth buying before you have a baby. These include a king-sized bed and a DSLR camera.
5. No one has invented a cloth diaper insert that can withstand the full force of my child's overnight bladder (see previous comment regarding all-night eating). While noble, 24-7 cloth diapering is not the parenting hill worth dying on. Slap a disposable on that butt and let 'er ride for the next 12 hours.
6. Whatever substance is in disposable diapers defies all laws of physics with it's absorbency. It's like a blackhole of wet. The only logical explanation is that someone got a patent based on a pact with the Devil. It was worth it.
7. Although you "can" start to feed solids to a baby at 6 months, some kids (mine) are not really interested in food until much, much, much later (maybe someday soon in fact). They will continue survive and even thrive on the occasional scrambled egg and massive quantities of frozen blueberries. In addition to the all-night nursing. Clearly.
8. Enjoy the period of time between when they learn to sit up and discover self-locomotion. These are the golden days of infancy. After that you will never have another quiet moment while they are awake until they move out of the house. At least it feels that way.
9. Kids will always move onto the next stage before you are prepared for them to. Parenting is a game of perpetual catch-up.
10. Babies, like fine wine, improve with age.
11. The person you created can become one of your favourite people on the planet before they even learn how to talk.
12. Being a parent will show you that you have far more patience than you ever thought possible for the people that matter to you. And far less for the people that don't.
13. Deciding to skip the prenatal classes and advice books was a good call. The war-stories of friends are far more valuable I feel.