Insight
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Desperate For A Good Night’s Sleep
I'll never forget the night my husband and I gave up on co-sleeping, probably because it was the first night we brought our baby into our bed. Our son was about four months old. Up until that point he had been spending his nights in an Arms' Reach mini-co-sleeper, a type of three-sided crib designed to attach to the side of our mattress. For fo...
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The Knock At The Door
After a few weeks, I couldn't take it anymore. I had tried polite refusal, contrived excuses, even pretending we weren't home. I knew I had to confront the situation head-on, but how exactly do you confront a six-year-old? Neighbour Girl lives across the street, and she used to walk into my house every weekend sans invitation, helping herself to...
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Better Than Family
I'm sitting at the playground watching Ruby do the rings. She has always been great at the rings — something I was never able to do as a kid. In typical Ruby fashion, she is encouraging other kids who think they can't do it to try, saying, "I was scared at first too, but I kept trying, and then I could do it!" The woman sitting next to me sig...
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Am I A Bumpaholic?
This morning, I awoke at seven a.m. to feed my hungry five-month-old, Clara. Soon after my husband left for work, her brothers Owen, three, and William, five, joined her on my bed and promptly began bickering — their favourite pastime these days besides nurturing their ever-growing collection of Pokemon cards. A while later, my older two sons Jac...
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Homeschool Drop-Out
Next month, I will drop my firstborn child off at the door of a school classroom for the first time. After I wave goodbye and bike home alone, we'll each begin secret lives: I'll spend my mornings writing stuff for grown-ups, while she makes friends, solves puzzles and gets in trouble in ways I'll never know. This is not how I planned it. I inten...
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Hitting The Bottle
This autumn, writer Stefanie Wilder-Taylor dropped a bombshell: she had quit drinking. A mother of three daughters — 4-year-old Elby and twin toddlers, Matilda and Sadie — Wilder-Taylor wrote on her personal blog Baby on Bored: "I really like to drink. I like the way wine softens the edges, smoothes out the line between &qu...
Insight
Who’s Crying Now?
My daughter's face is raw and red, with tears streaming down her cheeks. She's in full toddler-meltdown mode. I'm stricken, clenching her in a hug, my own face so close to tears you can almost see a wobble in the chin in the still photograph. Artistically, it is a fantastic photo. The lighting. The mood. As a photographer, I can appreciate it. A...
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Personal Essay: Pushing Back
"I'm going to have a VBAC," Annie said, "if it's the last thing I do." We were sitting in a antenatal yoga class and for at least half of each of these classes, we'd talk about where we planned to give birth, with whom, and how the endeavour was going — lots of chatter about lower backs and digestive systems. Annie, like almost every othe...
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