When you have kids, making plans is hard work. Even if you only have two kids, it seems that as soon as you are walking out the door, someone comes down with fever. Plans are never made with complete confidence.

When you have a bunch of kids, there are way too many variables involved. At any given time someone either has a cold, pink eye, fever, rash, the vomits, head lice, a broken leg, or all of the above. On the rare occasion that every single child is in perfect health, plans are often interrupted by hockey play-offs, music recitals, and dance lessons.

If the stars are all aligned, we actually have a chance of getting to our destination.

I recently made cottage weekend plans with three other families. There was one major complication – each of the three families has four kids. Do the math and you will find that the four families involved had a kid total of 18. To plan for a crew like that, there are a lot of stars that need to be aligned.

The cottage weekend planning Olympics officially kicked off about two months ago and involved four mamas exchanging countless Facebook messages. After pouring over our personal calendars and the children’s schedules, we accomplished the near impossible – we nailed a weekend that we were all available.

Planning is one thing, executing is another entirely. We were fully prepared for and expecting the last minute bail-out due to some infectious disease that no one wanted shared around. What we didn’t account for was the other risk involved – the plans of the daddy-o. In the end, one of the involved families was not able to come because the daddy-o had plans that were not on mama’s radar when she went ahead and made plans with us.

This is easily done. In our family, there have been countless times that daddy-o and I have left each other out of the loop on some pretty significant happenings or events. We have combated that by adopting an e-mail and outlook appointment policy – plans are not considered officially made unless they come across our laptop screens. If this sounds ridiculous, then enjoy the calm and peaceful household you live in. If this sounds sensible and effective, then welcome to my club.

I suppose we’d have greater odds of getting together socially with families who have fewer children. However, there’s something nice about spending time with mamas of many because they understand the dynamics of a big family - and heck, what do they say about misery loving company?

I’m never quite sure what to do about Father’s Day. Is it a time when daddy-o is supposed to spend the whole day bonding with his kid crew, or is it a day he should get a break from them?

After pondering the question for about five seconds, I decided to go with the bonding. Fact is, he spends a lot of time at work so doesn’t exactly need a ‘break’ from the kids. As such, I lined up a few dad and kid activities for the morning.

Breakfast in bed was not on the agenda, so the first activity was to send him off to his favourite greasy spoon with the three biggies followed by a trip to the golf store where he cashed in a gift certificate that was two-years-old. The rest of the day mostly involved daddy-o swimming in the backyard pool with the gang. Father’s Day is now wrapped up for another year.

Around here I feel that Mother’s Day should be treated a little differently to Father’s Day because of the difference in our parenting roles. The one fundamental difference is that I’m around the kiddos a helluva a lot and he is not. I need more bonding time with the kids about as much as I need a hole in the head. I like to celebrate Mother’s Day by having a few moments to myself - nothing drastic, maybe a sleep in until 8:00am and an hour in the afternoon. I don’t think that is too much to ask. Call it a double standard, but I don’t need to be surrounded by my peeps on my day, but daddy-o does on his day.

Years ago, on my second mother’s day, life was hectic as I was juggling Law School and two babies. I’ll never forget waking up on the morning on that Mother’s Day and daddy-o saying “I’m just going out for a couple of hours to do some Mother’s Day shopping”. Gulp. Do ya think maybe that should have been done during the week? My idea of Mother’s Day didn’t involve him going on a shopping excursion.

The rage that consumed me at the time makes it difficult to recollect or re-tell the story. All I know is that he gently threw me his wallet and car keys, grabbed the children and gently backed out of the room muttering phrases like “don’t rush back…..go for a coffee too….visit friends….buy whatever you like.” Again, the red I was seeing blurred my vision so this is just a vague recollection.

So here’s to every daddy-o out there. I hope the mamas spent the day doing exactly what I did - showing their great appreciation of you by providing you with opportunity to spend time with your lovely children!

The picture you see is of my beautiful nephew Emmett with his dog, Magnum. A picture of our family pet does not exist because we do not have, nor will we ever get a furry friend. My kiddos often complain about how difficult it is having a mean mama. I like to remind them that they may luck out in their next lives, but for now they are stuck with me.

Nagging for a pet is a hobby for my kids. Last summer I compromised and told them they could have fish, but not the pet store kind. You see, there are these nuisance fish called globbies that hang out in Lake Ontario and eat the eggs of native fish. When you pull a globbie out of the lake you are not supposed to put it back in, so they generally become lunch for the nuisance seagulls.

When fishing at the lake last summer, I let my kids put a few globbies in a bucket and bring them home. Generous, I know. We made a nice fish habitat in a big plastic container in the backyard. The excitement ended in disappointment the next morning when we discovered the local raccoons had a feeding frenzy on our pets - fish heads and guts scattered around the backyard. “Never mind” said I and back to the shores of Lake Ontario we went. We were determined to beat the raccoons at their own game. The next morning we were delighted to see that our pets survived the night. Things went pear-shaped later in the day when we went to check on our fish and they were all belly-up. Clearly, we are not a family well suited for pets.

The recent birth of Finian caused my sister to get a bit clucky. Her kids are now ten-years-old and six-years-old so she was not really thinking another baby at this point in the game. But, she was clucky enough that her kids were able to successfully talk her into a puppy. In comparing our baby and puppy stories, my sister and I have discovered is that we are going through remarkably similar experiences - except that her puppy is more work than my baby. Puppies don’t wear diapers and when they have ‘medical’ appointments, they are not covered by Medicare or any benefits plan.

Since playing with their cousins’ puppy, the nagging for a pet has started up again around here. I keep reminding them that we have wee baby Fin, to which they respond “but he’s a baby not a dog!!” Hmmm, can’t outsmart my clever kids.

I get that pets are good for kids – teaching them about responsibility, life cycles and all that good stuff. My feeling is that as long as I’m cleaning up human poop I’m steering clear of animal poop. Besides, spring is here so we can head back down to the lake for some more pets. Who knows – maybe we’ll be able to keep them alive for a full 24 hours this summer!

I was recently sitting around with my business partners chatting about our Mabel journey. We realized that over the last few years, the Mabel lifestyle has at times been a bit crazy. We have certainly found ourselves in some pretty wacky situations. So entertaining was the discussion, it’s worth sharing a few moments.

The Early Days:

- We were working out of a tiny basement making labels until 3:00am then going home to start the day with our kiddos at 6:00am. Oh, and three of the four of us were pregnant. You can understand why whenever we heard our friends complaining about being tired we’d quietly roll our eyes. Doing that first trimester fatigue on three hours sleep…..well, not our best days.

- We did everything ourselves, including licking the envelopes. Ellis and Cynthia licked so many one night, they almost vomited. We had flashbacks to George Costanza’s fiancé’s untimely death on Seinfeld, the direct result of envelope licking. We quite easily could have been a sit com, but the star roles were very unglamourous!

- One terrible night a printer broke. We went into action and quickly problem solved the situation - my mom was called in immediately. You see, she is a retired primary school teacher with very nice handwriting. She hand wrote the address on every order that evening.

- We once folded 5000 brochures by hand because we couldn’t afford the $100 folding fee.

- We paid our first web designer with a foosball table in lieu of cash.

Other Crazy Stuff:

- While at a Baby Show, Mumby fixed Sarah’s (savvymom.ca) BlackBerry with a bunch of Sticky Labels samples. When I saw Sarah six months later, she proudly showed me her BlackBerry – still being held together by Mabel’s Labels. We’ve seen some good customer hacks in our time but this takes the cake.

- After doing a recent Pirate themed Baby Show (yes, weird, we know), for days Mumby’s facebook status updates only said things like “a-hoy”, “errrr” and “eye matey”.

- I once became a ‘camping expert’ in less than a day after getting a request for such an expert to appear on Breakfast Television. I’ve never googled so much about any one topic before in my life.

- Mumby has been known to chit-chat with the editors from Penthouse while trying desperately attempting to come up with a PR angle.

- Mumby has been seen walking around Chicago with Oprah labels, just in case she ran into Oprah.

- Cynthia and I once drove for six hours for a four minute TV spot, only to then turn around and drive home.

- We once sent a box of brochures off to a camp then found out that a camel arrived instead of our brochures. Yes, a camel. We still have no idea who intercepted the package, but this is the stuff Mabel legends are made of. The camp even forwarded us the picture of the camel, which arrived with a Mabel magnet attached to it! Full story here: http://www.mabel.ca/wordpress/?p=252.

And just when we thought we’d done it all and seen it all, last week Ellis and I somehow ended up modelling in a mama fashion show. Uh, you remember that I’m five weeks out of my sixth c-section, right? Well clearly I forgot that fact when I agreed to strut my mama stuff. Three words: pass the Spanx!

So from the dark and dreary corners of a basement to the catwalk, I can only imagine the weird and wonderful places Mabel will take us in the next few years!

If you commented on the Name Game blog entry, keep watch on Caitlin’s “Mabel Files” (www.blog.mabel.ca) where she will soon be posting the winner of the Camp Pack. Caitlin takes care of all the official stuff and I get to have the blogging fun. Heck, I’m on maternity leave so it seems fair that I run the contest and someone else worries about monitoring entries, wouldn’t you say?

Although I’m on mat leave, I have not fallen off the face of the earth entirely - still blogging, checking facebook, on twitter, etc. To simply disappear from social networks and ignore good online discussion is not something this chatty mama is cut out for. Cocooning for an extended period of time off-line with my kiddos wouldn’t really work for me. And last I checked, my inbox didn’t get the memo that I’m on maternity leave.

In the last few days I’ve had both a radio and magazine interview. We like Mabel to get some airtime so an interview request is not the time to pull maternity leave rank - save that for when you want to guiltlessly forward annoying sales messages to your colleagues.

All things considered, my maternity leave rocks - I do what I like and ditch what I don’t. Not a bad gig really. But everyone has a different idea of what works for them.

I know one woman who was enjoying a long and successful legal and academic career when she gave birth for the first time at 43-years-old. When I was at Law School I would occasionally come across her articles which were nearly impossible to read - she spoke an entirely different language and it certainly didn’t involve words like “lactation” and “play date”. The transition from working world to mama world was too great a leap for her - she only lasted two weeks before heading back into the traditional workforce.

I know other mamas in similar situations who take great pleasure in retiring their blackberries for the full maternity leave then reluctantly blow the dust off them when it’s time to head back.

There is no right answer to what consitutes the perfect maternity leave. I’m officially heading back to Mabel life in September. After having six kids under foot all summer, the return to work will likely be a nice break from my maternity leave!

photo #1 - yes, checking my blackberry from my hospital bed

photo #2 - on the Enterprise Toronto panel last week. Finian at three weeks old was the youngest entrepreneur in attendance. Can you see the little guy on my lap?