Canada Moms Blog

America's Health Care Reform - One Step Forward

Last Sunday in the United States, the government signed into a law a bill that facilitated sweeping changes to the country’s current healthcare system.

Last week in Toronto, I had to rush my two-year-old to the hospital after she suddenly, alarmingly, clutched her neck and stopped moving. She was ok, but man did she give me a scare.

Both events got me thinking.

I got thinking about how very polarizing, controversial and hotly debated the former has been. And I got thinking about how very devastating the latter might have been – that is, if I had to actually deal with the former and not just write about it.

Admittedly, I do not know the minutiae of the health care reform issues on the table, but I do know and understand the big picture issues – I know and understand that millions of people in the United States cannot afford or qualify for health insurance, and therefore, must pay out of pocket when in need of medical assistance. I know that even when you can qualify for and afford health insurance, that insurance can easily be denied by a medical centre or practitioner because they are allowed to say that they don’t like the insurance you are probably paying a whole lot for. I know that my father needed FOUR different insurance policies just to be able to die, broke, in his hometown.

Marketers and Moms: Talk with us, not just about us

Finally, a Canadian conference about Marketing to Moms Online! I've been wondering for years when this was going to happen, and it's such a relief that there's going to be a forum where online Moms can really talk to Marketers and have an honest, open conversation. We're bursting with things to say, things about who we are and what we do and how we can truly work together for mutual benefit. There's so much misconception about "moms online" and what we do and how we behave and think.  It's wonderful to take advantage of the power in having a direct conversation, rather than having marketers just talk to other marketers about us instead of actually talking with us, or having some man present a study about "Meeting the 21st Century Mom".

Except, that direct conversation? is exactly what this conference is not doing.

I saw the link to the OpenDialogue Marketing to Digital Moms conference  from MomCentral Canada on Twitter. And when I saw the link, I was initially delighted. Thinking it was equivalent to Mom 2.0 or BlogHer Business - places where marketers who so covet the Mom market, who are dying to figure out ways to get under our skin, can actually talk to us - I thought, what a great opportunity.  A chance to talk to Canadian marketers!  And to tell them that we don't just surf. We write. We talk to each other. We find our niches. We rally around causes. We speak out against injustice, against misconception, against cruelty, against fools. We brand ourselves, and when we don't have big business budgets for branding, we figure it out for ourselves, or we turn to each other and give each other small business opportunities. We get together and start things, fun things, cool things, things that mock those that mock us (because, trust me, we're mocked a lot) and turn their arguments in to nothing more than bitter ash.

There is no Maternal health without Reproductive health.

It's times like these when I am truly, cringingly, embarrassed by our government.

It's no secret that I'm a pinko commie liberal. I believe in safety nets and socialized health care and helping those who are down on their luck. I believe in women's shelters and drug rehabs and needle exchange programs. I even listen religiously to the CBC. So it's not hard to find something for me to be angry about in most of our Conservative government's policies. However, this one goes beyond the pale, and not just for me. In their recently announced G8 initiative to promote maternal health in the developing world, the Tories have decided that birth control is not part of maternal health.

It's not me, it's you

That’s it: I’m breaking up with Canadian February. 

It doesn’t make sense, right? I mean, of all the months to loathe, why chose the shortest month of the year? Why pick on the month that brings the heart-and-flowery goodness of Valentine’s Day? In Ontario, February even delivers a long weekend in the form of Family Day. Here’s the rub: we Canadians have come to expect our long weekends to involve sun, beers and barbeque. Long weekends are not about waiting in line with 1000 other families for the ‘privilege’ of baring your translucent flesh at the public swimming pool.

It’s nothing personal, February, it’s just that you are so conveniently sandwiched between two months that aren’t as hate-worthy. January represents the start of a brand new year; the tabula rasa of months, with a little warm-and-fuzzy New Year’s Eve glitter still clinging to its hem. And March, well that is the month that ushers in the promise of spring. It heralds the return of bunnies and baby chicks, earthy smells and thick green stems clawing their way up through the supple earth.

What do you bring to the table, February? Your formerly fluffy, pristine snow is sludgy and dirty. The composter is stuffed right to the top. The kids’ winter coats are irretrievably stained. My minivan smells like goats have been breeding in the back. I have completely run out of ideas for packing school lunches. I am done, February. Done.

Some Canadians make the move to go somewhere warm in February. I think that is a calculated risk. For instance, this year you might have thought a Disney vacation was in order to beat the February blahs. However, you probably didn’t plan on having to wear jeans and sweaters on your ‘southern’ vacation. Nice one, February. Your evil is not constricted by the laws of physics or geography.

Let's talk about sex, Mom

When I was in grade four, the brother of a girl in my class brought a condom to school. The news spread like wildfire – by recess, a large group of kids had surrounded his locker, hoping for a glimpse. Having no idea what a condom was, let alone what one looked like, my curiosity had been sufficiently piqued. When I got home from school that afternoon, I broached the subject with my mother.

After her coughing fit had subsided, she fished a piece of paper from a pile on the dining room table and drew her best dome. I’d learned in sex-ed class (led by my hairy-chested and very oversexed Phys-Ed teacher) that a condom was used during sexual intercourse – I just didn’t know why, or what one looked like. Thanks to my mother’s illustration, I thought for years that condoms were made of hard plastic, with finely pointed tips.

That drawing, those sex-ed classes and what was scrawled in the stalls of my school’s second-floor bathroom sums up the extent of my sexual education as a child. I entered my teen years armed with more knowledge about the dangers of sex than its pleasures; when it came to the act of lovemaking itself, I was fairly clueless. It’s not the experience I want for my own children, and when it comes to The Talk, I have no qualms about having an open, honest discussion with them, when the time is right.

And when that time comes along I’m pretty sure that this half of the parental unit will be leading the conversation, as my husband still blushes when I use anatomically correct terms with our kids and shuts down altogether at the thought of them becoming sexually active.

“You can take care of that stuff,” he once told me, which, according to this article, is a popular consensus among fathers. It seems that, along with making meals, scheduling appointments, cutting crusts off of sandwiches and, well, everything else, initiating The Talk winds up on many mothers’ To Do lists as well.

According to the article, a third of kids in the U.S. aged 15-17 have had sex. Among teens aged 15-19, 13 per cent of females and 15 per cent of males had sex before they’d turned 15. A Toronto-based survey revealed that among teens aged 13 to 18, one-third were sexually active. It’s not surprising, really – sex is everywhere these days, and kids aren’t stupid.

Sign Me Up! School and Volunteerism

My daughter started school this year, and as a mother, this is a whole new ballgame. Where we live, Jr. Kindergarten is ½ day, everyday, so my daughter is out the door by 8:40 am, five mornings a week.

Our kids were never in daycare, so just getting my daughter out the door at a set time every morning sometimes feels like a Herculean effort – one that begins the night before, as I lay out clothes and pack healthy, sugar-free, nut-free, mess-free snacks (Labels! Don’t forget to label everything! Thank goodness for Mabel.) into her little owl backpack.

As a mother, having a school-aged child means staying on top of special pizza days and scientist days and gymnastics days and music days and dance days and holidays and P.A. days and birthdays, and all the little forms and slips and notes and instructions that go along with so many special days that I am left in a daze.

But as a working mother, I realize that all that stuff – all that administrative, organizational stuff – is actually the easy part. The easy part is integrating my daughter into the school system and ensuring that she gets the most out of her experience. The easy part is making sure that she becomes a member of the school community and thoroughly enjoys the little world she will inhabit for the next 7 years. The easy part is making sure she knows what’s going on.

The hard part is making sure that I do.

Clenchaholic

At my dentist appointment the other day I learned that I am most likely clenching and/or grinding my teeth at night. I was dubious at first, wondering whether my dentist was just trying to squeeze more money out of me by recommending a custom mouth guard that will end up costing me more than $300. Yet both my dentist and hygienist pointed to clear evidence of nightly shenanigans in my mouth: receding gums and teeth wearing down more rapidly than the resolve of a mother attempting to grocery shop at 5:00 p.m. with three kids in tow.

Still, I walked away from the dentist office without making the follow up appointment. I don't really grind my teeth, I reassured myself. If I were doing it, I would be experiencing frequent headaches. My jaw would be aching. Surely my husband would have said something!

Taking Chances - Early Cancer Diagnosis

If I play the lottery, there’s a very good chance I won’t win it. Still, sometimes I play it anyway.

If I take the subway during flu season, there’s a very good chance I might pick up a bug. But I take the subway anyway.

Going anywhere in a car is risky, very risky, but I will chance it, spending a few hours of every week sitting behind the wheel.

There is a decent chance that I carry a gene that puts me at an up to 70 per cent chance of developing a life-threatening cancer.

And unlike winning the lottery, getting the flu, or having a fender-bender, I have the unique opportunity of being able tolook into a crystal ball to find out if I have this gene.

Ok, it’s not a crystal ball. More like a petri-dish. Or a cotton swab. And the person telling my fortune will not be a mysterious Roma dripping in fake gems. It will be someone in a lab coat, and my fortune-telling surroundings will not be a veil-draped caravan, it will be a stark, decidedly unromantic clinic. But the question is not, can I have my future told, can I find out what my chances are? The question is, should I?

Should I find out if I, like 1 in 10 Jewish women in Ontario, carry the BRCA 1/ BRCA 2 genetic mutation?
I have already signed up for the study. I did that much, and I did it immediately. You may think this means that I want to find out if I carry the gene. But I’m not sure.

Full-Day-Every-Day Kindergarten is Coming to Ontario

Yesterday, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty named almost 600 elementary schools across Ontario that will be in the first wave to provide a full school day for kindergarten children. It turns out that my children’s school is on the list.

I have been paying particular attention to this issue because my third child, my baby girl, is set to start Junior Kindergarten (JK) this September. I’m really quite pleased with the fact that my child will be in one of the pilot schools. I should add the caveat here that she will be four-and-a-half years old when September hits. If she were born later, I would probably feel less confident about her stamina for coping with that much school. Given her age, and the fact that she is already somewhat used to a structured day thanks to attending preschool three full days a week, I think her transition to all day, every day will be fairly smooth.

Bedtime is Overrated

School starts again tomorrow and I am fervently hoping that my children have recovered from the Late Night Gorge Fest that seems to have been the theme of our Christmas holidays. If my husband and I tend to be pretty relaxed about bed time on weekends, over the holidays, we are consistently near-comatose. The older children never went to bed before 10:30 p.m., with the three-year-old often matching their pace. And, yes, at a New Year’s Eve dinner at our friends’ house, they all stayed up past midnight.

In fact, this is not the first time that my kids have stayed up past midnight on New Year’s Eve. The first year we let them welcome the New Year with us was a thrill; now, it is simply expected. Even the year that we were home-bound due to chicken pox, they all stayed up watching home movies and drinking ginger ale out of wine glasses. I suppose if they became crabby or started fighting we would feel compelled to put them to bed. As it is, they are consistently well behaved on New Year’s Eve.

This year they passed the time playing Wii, watching movies and making up dances for us to watch. As midnight approached, we all gathered in front of the TV, noise-makers in hand, sparkly tiaras perched on our heads. As the ball began to drop, we shared an enthusiastic countdown with our friends. At midnight I found myself not in the arms of my loving husband, but with an overjoyed little girl on my lap, big kid arms slung around my neck and more than one pair of lips to kiss. Happy New Year, indeed.