It’s not that I don’t like Halloween. Believe me, I heart zombies and dismembered bodies on my front lawn as much as the next gal. It’s just that Halloweening as a parent, much like sitting down to have your meal, taking a shower, or consuming your beverage while it’s still hot is proving to be an event that requires as much planning as the G20 summit. Halloween is a minefield laid with parent booby traps. Take one wrong move and you land on Wastefulness. Another one and you’re confronted with parenting’s most daunting trap, Guilt.

Everyone knows that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, but what happens when the going hits the galactic fan and then gets all surreal with a shade of apocalypse on you? Where's my copy of “This is Not a Drill – Your Guide to Surviving 2016”?

“I don’t understand why you’re making these mistakes,” she sighed, exasperated.

I can’t remember my answer. I’m sure I apologized (acknowledge your mistakes) and made some sort of a positive, reassuring statement (demonstrate that you’ve learned from this experience).

One of the side effects of aging, as it turns out, is realizing that if you really want something, sometimes you’ll just have to get it yourself. Gretchen Rubin elaborates on that concept in her book The Happiness Project when she discusses expecting praise (gold stars, as she refers to it) for the hard work she’s been doing as a mother and a wife. She talks about coming to terms with the fact that the praise will sometimes have to be self-generated.

The scariest thing is that I never even thought about it in sexual harassment terms until my husband shared an alarming statistic with me about the number of girls who experience assault in our home country. The numbers seemed unreasonably high and it got me reflecting on my own experience. I was never raped. Nothing TERRIBLE ever happened. It’s not like I was groped. Or was I?

Let’s play a game. It’s called My Biggest Turn Off  and I’ll start.

Summer is all about DIY, as in "do it yourself, parents." As such, you may find yourself bending over backwards before even 8am as you try to come up with fresh ideas to entertain your children. Everybody loves the beach, but sometimes we don’t feel like spending two and a half hours negotiating the details of an outing and then three more hours getting everyone out the door - with sunscreen applied, no less.

So that’s when you bring the beach to your own breakfast table!

The era of Pokémon is upon us, and I’m becoming a reluctant expert in damage points, energy, and Mega Charizard. The object of your child’s obsession is annoying by definition. “Please tell me more about your current obsession, because hearing about it twenty four seven just doesn’t cut it anymore,” said no parent ever.

Last Monday we came back from two and a half weeks of vacation in Italy with our two sons, three and seven years-old.  A lot of people we’ve met on our trip or talked to beforehand called us “brave” (a euphemism for cray cray) for doing this. While two little boys may not be the perfect candidates for appreciating Italy’s rich history, architecture and art, we had an unforgettable experience travelling with them. There is, however, always room for improvement. Below is a list of some of the mistakes we’ve made during our trip.

Remember high heels and date nights?

This was the caption to a photograph I recently posted on Facebook. The picture was taken to capture a joyous event, a special occasion.

Remember when date nights were a given?

My seven year-old recently asked me the following question:

Do you have a spring cleaning routine? Perhaps a more relevant question would be “do you have SPRING?”  While so many of us still can’t see the spring for the snow/rain/single digit temperatures, others are thrilled to be unfollowing their winter gear and comfort food in preparation for warmer weather. Spring, after all, is about feeling lighter. Those among us, searching for jobs will, no doubt, feel invigorated about pursuing their job search in a non-polar vortex reality, but what about their résumés? Don’t they deserve to feel lighter too?

It’s a good thing I don’t keep neat little notebooks with pros and cons lists and other things I imagine people with a birth plan would tackle. Had I kept such a notebook with a birth plan that included Epidural, I’d be one chagrined camper in the spring of 2009 and summer of 2012. This was when I experienced childbirth without Epidural and it was... owie. I know that people with a plan sometimes struggle greatly when it falls apart.

To put the bottom line first, I'm grateful for the recent decision made by the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario to treat one woman's miscarriage as a case of disability. If the ensuing shift in disability law which CBC alludes to will indeed occur,  then going on a disability leave when you miscarry could become a reality.

Something unusual happened on our drive back from our weekend away. I could hear myself thinking “how come it’s so quiet in here?” It wasn’t a pregnant kind of silence either, one that precedes a fierce “WHY IS THIS TAKING SO LONG?” toddler tantrum or a toy fishing rod poke in the driver’s eye. No, it was a much eerier, unchartered territory of the real deal, Dead Silence, something that parents don’t get to experience very often.

Especially not parents of chatty kids.

My husband is nothing like Wash My Green Shirt and Fetch Me Some Coffee dad in the ad. He is a hands on dad who once, when we had just moved in together, remained completely unmoved when I shared this new revelation with him from a lecture I attended: couples shouldn’t strive for a 50% - 50% kind of arrangement, they should each be putting in 100%. You see, he had already arrived at this conclusion himself.

Some days I wish that there was an app that would screen my feed and omit the stories that are too much for me to handle. Like the one about the baby dolphin that died of dehydration when it was being passed around on the Santa Teresita beach in Argentina for selfies and photographs.

Let’s just get with the times and ditch the term “struggling moms” once and for all. I mean, it’s 2016, for God’s sake.

No, it’s not because the parenting struggle isn’t real. Parenting, and motherhood in particular, might be the realest struggle that ever struggled and it’s precisely because of that that we should stop. Let mommy explain.

January will mark the ninth anniversary of my immigration to Canada with my husband. Nine years of answering the question "But why here? Why Canada?"

The Syrian refugees arriving in our country these days may not be expected to address such a question for obvious reasons, but I'm certain there will come a day when someone detecting a foreign accent will innocently pose it and they may or may not be prepared to respond. I'd like to offer my own answer. And I'm going to be completely honest this time.

My social media feeds were flooded with Paris on Friday just like yours were, I’m sure. Messages of support and words of bewilderment, hope, and despair were sent traveling up my phone screen to make way for older posts and updates, as feed chronology dictates. In moments like these – when you know what’s on everyone else’s mind - so many of us experience a sense of connection to something larger - humanity, if you will, and pardon the cliché. It’s a pretty powerful feeling completely lost on some of us.