Trust me, as with lunch, there's no such thing as a free baby.


Ottawa people have likely seen these ads already.

As a promotion, a local radio station is giving away in vitro fertilization treatments totaling $35, 000 in winnings.

Cue the irrational screams of "won't somebody please think of the children!" Oh wait, here's the National Post chiming in already.

Personally, I think this is hands down the most brilliant marketing gimmick I've seen in years, if not ever (although, in my childhood brain, it still doesn't beat the Toys R' Us shopping spree contest for shear envy/excitement value).

But I'm even more impressed that a DJ for the radio station also mentioned the political side of things in an interview with the Globe and Mail: "Yes, it’ll grab people’s attention, but hopefully what it would do is get people talking about fertility issues and have our government – who, by the way, are in an election [campaign] right now, as you know – bring this to the forefront,” Mr. Mauler says."

Now, I still wouldn't listen to this station if you paid me and I'm a tad disturbed by the fact that they claim this contest is aimed at their target demographic of women age 25 to 54, but they deserve all the attention this is getting. Even if the people who win end up regretting that the $35, 000 wasn't spent on a dream vacation and getting 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep a night for life.

And now for something completely different, this has to be one of the funniest articles I've ever read. And not just because of the repeated mentions of anal-cavity searches. Whatever else you can say about Conrad Black, dude has a way with words.

"Black was manacled, then followed the guard—“a large, black, bald man,” he notes—through a series of interior rooms, where he was stripped and searched. “I removed all my clothes and satisfied my captor that nothing was concealed in my mouth, underarms, behind my scrotum or in the approaches to my rectum,” he writes. “I would receive a great many medical and security anal inspections over the next couple of weeks, and was slightly mystified at the extent of official curiosity about that generally unremitting aperture.”

He was issued his prison uniform, a pair of “safety shoes,” sheets, and a pillow. The only personal item he was allowed was his eyeglasses. After being processed, Black was led through the large open-air recreation area—leave the designated path, an escort warned, and he would be shot—and into the dormitory where he would live, B-1, an open room where the living spaces were divided by six-foot partitions. Because he was over 60, Black was given a single bed, with a desk. On an adjacent bunk bed he found his two “roommates,” a Guatemalan man and a Cuban who said he had paddled to Florida on the detached roof of an ice-cream truck. Neither spoke much English, and both gave the sense that Coleman compared favorably to their native countries. “I believe the Cuban gentleman thought he was in the Ritz-Carlton,” Black says." ~ Bryan Burrough, "The Convictions of Conrad Black"

"When I breastfed in the park, grandmothers would regale me with tales of the dozen children they had fed. When I breastfed in the back of taxis, drivers would give me the thumbs-up in the rearview mirror and assure me that Calum would grow up to be a great wrestler. When I walked through the market cradling my feeding son in my arms, vendors would make a space for me at their stalls and tell him to drink up. Instead of looking away, people would lean right in and kiss Calum on the cheek. If he popped off in response to the attention and left my streaming breast completely exposed, not a beat was missed. No one stared, no one looked away—they just laughed and wiped the milk off their noses.

From the time Calum was four months old until he was three years old, wherever I went, I heard the same thing over and over again: “Breastfeeding is the best thing for your baby, the best thing for you.” The constant approval made me feel that I was doing something important that mattered to everyone—exactly the kind of public applause every new mother needs."
~ Ruth Kamnitzer, "Breastfeeding in the Land of Genghis Khan" (via Aux Petits Oiseaux)


I really enjoyed this article, and not just as a welcome break from all the "babies in Africa never cry" BS that is typically floating around the whitey attachment parenting sites. I found it particularily interesting that in such a pro-boob culture, the author never met anyone doing tandem nursing.

I also got a kick out of her description of the men having "breast envy". Which of course made me think of this "Family Guy" clip.

This is awesome. I will be envious of Movember no longer.

Unshaven Mavens via Apt 613

Here's a another deeply serious parenting issue for y'all to consider: to what extent do you let toddlers dress themselves?


I hate to crush her creativity or stymie the development of autonomy but I also don't want her to look back on her childhood photos and accuse me neglect by allowing her to traipse about dressed like an escaped bi-polar circus midget.

So far my only real limits have been insisting that she have pants on when we leave the house. After all, we may be known in the 'hood as the freaky hippies that insist on composting, voting Green and only mowing their lawn once a month but dammit, we will wear pants in public.

On that note, if you ever want to pop over for a visit, please call in advance to ensure that our family pants-status is set to "On".

"Oh, you mean my little mule, Pepe?"

I got "Romancing the Stone" on DVD as a gift for my birthday.

For better (or worse) it was one of my favourite childhood movies. Thankfully it turns out that it's just as good as I remembered.

Do you remember your mother playing with you?


My mother was a stay-at-home-mom until I was in high school. I remember her cleaning. I remember her paying bills, making doctors appointments, buying groceries, driving us to-and-from school, cooking meals, doing laundry, washing dishes and helping us with homework.

I have no memories of her playing with me. No crafting. No homemade playdough. No fort-building. No hide-and-go-seek.

It doesn't/didn't bother me. I think/thought I had a pretty great childhood.

I've talked to several friends who similarly have few, if any, memories of their mothers playing with them. They all feel they had good childhoods.

So I'm fascinated by the seeming shift in our culture which has taken place in the last 20-30 years. As far as I can tell, sometime around the heyday of divorce-guilt in the 80s, the term "quality time" joined the lexicon. Parents, both employed and non, felt compelled to spend more one-on-one, meaningful, facetime with their children. For the most part doing whatever it was that the kids wanted to do. I feel the Lego company was delighted.

It's not as though before the 80s parents never hung out with their kids but it just seems that it was less of an obligation and more of a "all the house work is done, let's relax and enjoy each other" type of thing. Stay-at-home-mothers before that time were homemakers/managers first and playmates last. They didn't seem to feel guilty about this at all. We had friends and siblings to fulfil that role. Parents were our caregivers and not our buddies.

But that's changed hasn't it? It can't be just my observation or experience that many (most?) parents now feel a genuine duty to fulfil the role of peer for their kids. That we should and do feel borderline abusive for telling a child to go and amuse themselves for a while so we can make dinner or clean the house. Or for not loving every minute of yet another inane round of dress-up-and-make-believe.

It feels intuitive to me that there's also a link between this guilt and the fear of letting children play without adult supervision. No responsible parent kicks their kid out of the house to go terrorize the neighbourhood for the hours after school/before dinner without feeling a nagging sense of negligence and tension anymore. So we keep them safe, inside, socially-isolated and bored.

And we feel guilty because they're bored. We feel guilty because we resent feeling obligated to entertain them. We feel guilty because sometimes the games they want to play are so mindfuckingly boring for us that we'd rather be scrubbing a toilet. We feel guilty because we buy them endless toys and distractions just to be able to buy ourselves some childfree time.

Which all makes me wonder whether my kids and their friends will remember playing with their mothers. And I wonder whether their memories will reflect an enjoyable, carefree childhood or one tainted by the sense that, for their parents, spending time playing with them was often more about guilt than desire.

"Whatever else may be wrong with our world, it remains a fact that some of the most terrifying instances of human conflict and stupidity would be unthinkable without religion. And the other ideologies that inspire people to behave like monsters—Stalinism, fascism, etc.—are dangerous precisely because they so resemble religions. Sacrifice for the Dear Leader, however secular, is an act of cultic conformity and worship. Whenever human obsession is channeled in these ways, we can see the ancient framework upon which every religion was built. In our ignorance, fear, and craving for order, we created the gods. And ignorance, fear, and craving keep them with us."
~ Sam Harris

Another great bit of writing from Harris.

One of these days I may have to read one of his books.

Although I can't stand most of the Beatles' music, especially their later experimental drug-induced crap, it does somehow make me happy to know that a couple of good old freedom-loving hippies approved of the use of a child-leash.

I blame Yoko for the bottle.

via Zan

"Being nice to your little sister is great, but pushing her over is also pretty cool when you’re three and a control freak. Eating dinner nicely is fine, but throwing the plate across the room when you’re bored is also hilariously funny. Similarly staying in bed at night is perfectly reasonable, but nowhere near as enticing as the thought of running down the hall shrieking at the top of your lungs. You can poop in the toilet if you want the pat on the head, but dropping a big log on the living room floor is far more entertaining." ~ Nigel Latta, "The Real Golden Rule"


Some brilliant insight into kid's brains and guidance on how to ensure that punishment is effective.

I'm filing away his post about punishing teenagers for future reference.

Though, I don't think he mentions my personal favourite technique I heard somewhere for when kids are fighting in a car: pulling over and starting to make out with your spouse in the front seat until the kids get grossed out enough to stop fighting.

Theme for the kid's second birthday party: "Lord of the Flies".


Oddly enough, my efforts at googling inspiration for said party turned up very little. I think people take this whole parenting gig far too seriously sometimes.

I was going to try to pull off a pig roast but it turns out that those things are stupid-expensive. So we went with a Southern BBQ menu and I made a couple of salads and several batches of pulled pork in ye olde crockpot. The husband whipped-up a layered devil's food cake that we topped with a couple of conch shells from Dollarama. Add some crepe streamers, a handmade pig head pinata, a few balloons, a couple of inflatable palm trees and the mise-en-scene was complete.

I dressed the kid up in a frilly pink party dress, dropped a Halloween necklace made of plastic skulls around her neck, slapped some war paint on her face and let her lose in the backyard with a pack of stray children. She had a blast.


By the way, if anyone needs a couple of free, semi-abused, 3 foot and 6 foot inflatable palm trees for any reason, please let me know.

I'm also available for all your future quasi-sarcastic, budget-friendly, themed party and custom pinata needs.