Parenting, Depression and Mental Illness (Guest Post)

October is Depression Awareness Month in the United States and October 6 to 12 is Mental Illness Awareness Week in Canada. To raise awareness about the challenges of parenting while depressed, I'm pleased to welcome Kristin Craig Lai to the blog to share her story. Please read her story about "parenting through the madness".

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Beyond Judging: France to Fine and Jail Beauty Pageant Parents

Here in North America, there is a lot of finger pointing judgment and feminist critique of the sexualization of girls in the child beauty pageant industry.In France, they are moving beyond the judging and the critiquing and are planning to make it illegal to put your daughter in a beauty pageant, punishable by two years of jail time and fines of 30,000 Euros.

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Minecraft Birthday Cake: Creeper Vs. Ghast

I'm not the mom who does crafts or sews halloween costumes or cuts up vegetables into fun little shapes. But the one pinteresty thing that I do is to decorate birthday cakes for my children's birthdays. Each year they pick a theme, and I figure out how to make it happen. Having a child who turned nine this month, it seemed rather probably that this year's request would be for a Minecraft cake. And it was.

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Can We Talk About the Parental Food Police?

I never aspired to a career in law enforcement. The whole idea of trying to police a set of sometimes logical and sometimes arbitrary laws through a combination of rule setting, surveillance, "keeping the peace", and punishment gives me the hives. But when it comes to food and children, I sometimes (often, actually) feel like the parental food police. How do I change that?

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A Girl Gets Her Doll - Flashback to the 1980s (Guest Post)

When she was a little girl, Karin went off in search of a baby boy doll to add to her collection. This is a little story about her search and how she found "Tommy".

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