I have never bought myself jewellery, never!  I had never seen anything that I thought to myself “I have to have that!”  Unless it came in a blue box with a grey bow.  But that’s beside the point

I came across some friends that were sporting the cutest charm bracelets that had their children’s names engraved on little discs and had an adorable face in the centre of it.  Well, I have to have that!

I went online to Ali’s website www.allisoriginals.com and was surprised at just how many choices there were.  Bracelets, necklaces, id tags, earrings, and so on.  Imagine, shopping for jewellery from the comfort of your own home, in your pj’s, drinking coffee. 

I knew that I wanted to order the charm bracelet and had a few questions for Alli first.  She was very helpful and offered her suggestions and I have to say, was an easy, easy experience. 

The bracelet was ready in no time so I anxiously went to pick it up.  Never mind the bracelet, the packaging was absolutely adorable.  It would make a perfect gift for someone, but was such a nice treat for myself.  It came in a cute little tin container with a pink label on it, wrapped in heart tissue paper, in a cellophane bag with a pink bow to top if off.  Need I say more?  And the bracelet is Terrific!  I fell in love with it and have worn it every day since I picked it up.  It is durable and adorable!

Treat yourself, or treat someone you know.  It’s a great way to show off your kids without pulling out the photo album out of your purse each time you meet up with an old friend.

Visit www.allisoriginals.com 

I just received an e-newsletter from a pregnancy website that I didn’t sign up for. My subscription could be the result of one of my hilarious Mabel’s Labels co-workers thinking I should be following this pregnancy of mine a little more closely.
My first e-newsletter arrived congratulating me for being 30 weeks pregnant. I did the math which confirmed that the website knows more about my pregnancy than I do. It went on to tell me how I should be feeling - which is bad. Each day should now be greeted lethargically. Varicose veins should be plaguing me, along with the inability to sleep and the constant urge to urinate. This coming week I’m told to look forward to stretch marks, and the word “gassy” came up on several occasions.
And here I’ve been going along feeling great and largely forgetting that I’m actually brewing a baby. Time to start pulling rank, I say. I’m going to commit to some waddling and maybe groan when I go from the sitting to standing position. Hey, I’m 30 weeks pregnant so fully entitled - my new e-newsletter told me so. Take that Mabel gals and see how much fun I am to work with now. That little e-newsletter thing really backfired!
My e-newsletter also informed me that my baby is now the size of a squash, which erupted controversy among the other 30-week e-newsletter subscribers. There were no less than 47 comments from the moms-to-be expressing passionately either for or against the baby/squash comparison. With so many opinions on the topic, I was left thinking that this was a case of hormones gone wild. I tried to have an opinion, but nothing happened. Does this mean I don’t care as much as they do about my squash….er…..I mean, my baby?
The next part is what really freaked me out. It provided me with a link to my personalized pregnancy to-do list. It looked like this:
Number of items on to-do list: 78

Number of items completed on to-do list: zero
Yes, apparently I have 78 things left to do before I have this baby. I can’t even bring myself to open the link to my list. As someone who is now 10 weeks late for her first obstetrician appointment, I can’t start stressing about pulling out my little sleepers from bins in the basement and whitening my whites.
Mamas have about nine months to prep for baby. While there may be about 75 things left on my official ‘to-do’ list on the day this baby arrives, I have a feeling we’ll somehow muddle through it.
**The pic is of me 38 weeks pregnant with some other baby…..probably thinking it would be my last pregnancy so got the photo done!

There are only a few things that I like about Valentine’s Day, and when I say ‘few’ I actually mean one. I fondly remember my mom sneaking a little chocolate and note into our lunch boxes on Valentine’s Day. It was memorable because we were not the kind of kids who had treats showered upon us. I have enjoyed carrying on that tradition with my school aged children. That about sums up the joy I get out of Valentine’s Day.

The main problem is that I have a strong aversion to anything cheezy and Valentine’s Day is just dripping with it. The first dance at weddings makes me cringe and seeing a smooching couple can create symptoms that rival morning sickness. Occasionally daddy-o has given me a piece of jewelry thinking it’s the right thing to do. Instead of getting emotional and speechless, I am left questioning why he didn’t get me something more sensible - like real estate, for example. Now real estate is something I could get giddy over. Why jewelry when I don’t even wear my wedding rings? I should mention that not wearing my wedding rings caused my father to comment this week about how inappropriate it is considering my “condition”. Yes, I really had to field that comment.
Maybe I had some romantic notions in the past but considering what the last decade has served up, you can see why there has been a shift towards the practical.
Valentine’s Day creates a fair bit of work for me. You can imagine what a huge undertaking it is to oversee the completion of Valentine’s cards for all the school friends, neighbourhood kids and cousins. What puts me over the edge is when they return home from school with gobs of Valentine’s Day stuff. Gone are the days of the simple card - mine arrive home with bags of lollies, pencils, stickers and even gift bags! Who had to go and raise the bar on this? Whoever you are - I’m officially boycotting.

If you listen closely, you can hear nursing mothers of newborns collectively moan on February 14th. You see, these new mamas do not need some contrived holiday that makes husbands feel entitled to some bedroom action. It’s one thing to have a little human hanging off your breast all day, and another entirely to have a big human thinking it’s his turn because the calendar told him so.
This year I beat the system. A mama friend recently opened an indoor playground (http://www.antzinyourpantz.ca/) and created a “Daddy and Princess” Valentine’s event. Daddy-o and his three princesses were registered immediately and I celebrated this Valentine’s Day by removing four people from my house for an entire afternoon!
Another Valentine’s Day survived and all there’s left to show for it is the scattering of cards and wrappers around the family room floor, a few sugar highs and my cinnamon heart hang-over.

The picture you see is of my 92-year-old grandma with two of her countless great-grandchildren. She looks a pleasant woman, and indeed she is - but truth be known, she is a woman of great power and everyone should be a little bit afraid of her. For me, I’m most afraid when I am about to share pregnancy news with her.
It seems an odd fear considering grandma gave birth nine times and her mother went through the ordeal a shocking twenty-one times (yes, twenty-one). So why in such a prolific family would I have this fear? Quite simply it is because grandma is a strange combination of a traditional Irish Catholic granny mixed with an intellectual feminist. Picture Gloria Steinem playing the part of Ma on Little House on the Prairie.
While she outwardly greets my pregnancy news with joy, her eyes cry out “WHY would you have another baby in a time when women have CHOICE?”
Fair question considering how things were for that generation of women. My grandpa worked several jobs as grandma ran a household, rendering her virtually housebound. Women at that time were so bogged down with the daily task of running a household there was barely time to even enjoy their children. Those were the days when a woman’s status was defined by how early in the morning she had the cloth diapers hanging on the line to dry.
As much as we all love our children, motherhood can be an isolating and mind-numbing task at times. It is no wonder grandma sometimes shakes her head and questions why a woman of my age and in these times would have six children.
As I read through the entries to our BlogHer contest, one difference in our generation of mamas becomes abundantly clear: we have access to the Internet, and the Internet provides us with community. Even on those days when we can’t escape the four walls of our homes and those walls are seemingly closing in on us, we can hop on our computers and find a community of support. For those few moments, we have a break from the loud monotony of raising our children.
Mamas now blog and read blogs. We connect on Facebook. If at 3:00am I am wondering why my toddler has green poops, I will post it on a mama message board. By 4:00am I will likely have several responses, including some that simply reach out to say they hear my concerns. During the loneliest hours of motherhood, your virtual saviour is a click away. Our grandmothers did not have those faceless saviours.
Sure, husbands like to mock our Facebook, e-mail, message board and blog addictions, but during these uncivilized years of raising kids we have to do whatever we can to remain sane. So log on and find the community who is waiting to greet you, embrace you and most of all be there to support you no matter what time of day or night.

I remember the birth of my first child quite vividly. The other deliveries tend to blend a bit. I’ve been known to say things like “during one delivery, my blood pressure was really low” or “one of my babies had low blood sugar after birth”.

Which baby? What delivery? I can’t answer those questions with any kind of confidence.

I even remember the details about Number One Son’s first year of life. Not so sure about the others, but I can confirm that they wore nothing but sleepers for a year and each additional child spent more time sitting in a bouncy chair with a soother shoved in his/her gob.

There is a clever little joke that circulates on e-mail outlining the differences in parental treatment between first and later-borns. One example is how parents respond when a child swallows a coin:

First child: parent rushes child to hospital and demands an x-ray;
Second child: parent cautiously monitors child expecting coin to pass in bowel movement;
Third child: parent deducts coin amount from child’s allowance.

Subsequent pregnancies are also different. You start dropping things like taking vitamins and caring about eating all the right foods. You can even convince yourself that a glass of wine will do the baby some good.

As I’m gearing up for c-section number six, the actual delivery is being treated differently as well. It is becoming more and more difficult to find a suitable birth date for this child. You might assume that the date would be based on my doctor’s schedule and recommendations, but this is not so. Working around the schedule of this busy family makes any obstetrician’s schedule look like a summer vacation. The date of this baby’s arrival has to work around such factors as when I can line up care for the siblings, a pending business trip I have, violin recitals, dance exams, soccer try-outs, and an important school event for my daughter.

And if that isn’t difficult enough, daddy-o sent me an e-mail this week outlining dates that would best suit his work schedule. Enough already! I told him I had to remove his schedule from the mix. He would simply be required to make himself available on the date provided to him via his Outlook Express.

It may look like this baby is causing a few ‘prior to arrival’ organizational hassles, but I don’t doubt for a second that we will one day fondly remember that busy time when our kid count was rounded out to a half a dozen. Well, if history repeats itself we likely won’t remember, but at least this blog will be hanging around to jog our memories!

***and speaking of blogs, one of the things I love about blogging is having an online journal that helps me connect with readers and other bloggers. We have had some awesome entries to the Mabel’s Labels BlogHer contest, and it’s not too late to get involved. Go to http://www.blogcontest.mabel.ca/