Well that actually helps... I’m going on mat leave soon so will leave it on my list for breastfeeding marathons :)

...really...?

It’s both fierce and adorable at the same time!

The books really are wonderful (says the 42 year old who has read them multiple times since childhood...), but maybe it’s just a slow starter for you, like Harry Potter was for me. I got through the first few books because I “had” to (I wanted to know what all the fuss was about and I was bored on a trip), but Harry…

Yeah no. Ontarian over here, with, erm, limited insight into the whole dealio... (I now work adjacent to the people adjacent to these files, no direct involvement but I see what’s happening and know how things work here). Trudeau most definitely supports the oil and gas industry, it’s the liberal positioning on…

I joke about it but I also did find that the movie Away We Go to be quite helpful in defining my approach to parenting, because even though the different approaches were clearly caricatured (Maggie Gyllenhall as the attachment parent nightmare was hilarious), there are still elements of both parent-led and baby-led…

I just snorted really loudly in my quiet office :)

Ha, my midwife’s office library doesn’t even stock it, they said while it’s mostly medically accurate it’s also shamey and terrifying*. But then they do stock all the Ida May yoni-flower-ocean wave-orgasmic birth books so I took it all with a grain of salt :)

Bite your tongue, Marmite is not the same thing! (says the Canadian who is villified daily for her love of vegemite!)

Pfft, Kiwis shouldn’t talk, they have Marmite which is worse...

I’ve only visited Auz couple of times, but vegemite is magical - delicious and also an excellent torture device to be judiciously deployed on my husband...

Being neither vegan nor Australian, I nonetheless submit that both are valid “something-rights” :)

Try 0-25 year olds for psycho-social development - legality (aka being 18), doesn’t magically turn someone into a thinking, reasoning adult. She’s still smack dab in the middle of the idiocies of youth. That said, it doesn’t excuse her behaviour, she made some undeniably shitty choices and she sounds like she’s much…

Um, he’s 87 and won an Oscar a mere 5 years ago, and has been working consistently in film and the international theatre scene for 50 years (he has a movie coming out with Vera Farmiga, he’s in The Tempest in the UK this year, and he regularly comes home to Stratford Festival in Ontario as well). He’s got no issues…

Well exactly. I have never beat a person up in my life, but I still wouldn’t want to be judged by who I was and what I did as a teen (and that with most of it classifiable as merely vaguely embarrassing, totally innocuous and occasionally dumb).

Well then you were lucky in that you weren’t indoctrinated by a gang (or worse yet by the military as a child soldier, both situations where teens are very likely to accept that physical violence is acceptable). Again, not excusing Wahlberg, but teens, from a pscyho-physiological perspective, by their very biology,…

I’ve never met him but once sat a few feet away from him in a low key but very nice restaurant in small town Ontario - he was so relaxed, and no one bothered him, but he had quite a magnetic presence nonetheless, especially when you could hear him talking and laughing in the background (love his voice!). He could…

I know, when I read Christopher Plummer and Mark Wahlberg in the same sentence, I don’t immediately go to: wow, this must be a stellar movie - I think: oh Christopher, what are you doing??

Also, still not defending Wahlberg but... have you met many teens when you weren’t a teen? They are all stupid to one degree or another... And I say that as someone who genuinely likes kids, and has taught teens. Even the “good” ones are idiots (yes, me included back in the day).

That’s not actually true though, plenty of people learn to overcome hatred and fear of the other, whether it manifests as racism, sexism, whatever. Maybe they learn it imperfectly, but that’s not uniformly so - otherwise people could never learn anything (and if they can learn to hide racism, they can also learn to…