Shiny, happy, smudgy-faced baby, all jacked up on Disney’s Animal Kingdom safari. Kinda hard to be angsty and sad, looking at that face. This is, I suppose, the function and purpose of angels.

*More shiny happy faces can be found over at Happy Face Central.

**And also here, where maple syrup and skateboards collided to create an alternate parallel Tennessean universe of awesome.

***Not here, though, because it’s a discussion about parenting and judgment and nasty things like spanking, and I might have been called “disgusting” in the comments, so. Fill up on angel faces at the other links first, maybe.

Friday’s as good a good as any for promoting a cause, right? How about two?

Cause #1: If you’re a Canadian woman, and you’ve had surgery, you might have been been given – while you were under anesthetic, without your knowledge, without your consent – a pelvic exam by medical students in training. It is, apparently, standard practice in Canada, and no, they don’t actually want to ask for your consent, because you might not give it. So they’ve settled for insisting that when you go in for surgery, you’ve implied that you consent to letting them do anything to your body that they like. You know, just like that time you accepted just one more glass of wine and got a little too drunk: you implied that you were just fine with whomever doing whatever to your body while you were passed out.

Gives new, sinister meaning to the phrase, trust me, I’m a doctor.

I ranted about it over at the Bad Moms Club yesterday, and posted an open letter/petition there in the wee hours this morning. Please leave a comment in support (and pass the link along!) – we (all women, and everyone who supports women – not just Canadians) need to raise our voices and say loudly and clearly that NO CONSENT means NO.

Cause #2: Most of you know about Tanner. Tanner is my nephew, my sister’s son, and he’s living with, but dying of, Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy. He’s really begun to decline in recent months. Our hearts are breaking while his stays strong – in love and hope, if not in muscle – and I’ve been feeling a powerful need to honor his strength and to meet his strength and to use that strength to move and to act, now, while he’s still with us. So I’ve decided to run for him, in the hopes that I can, by the end of a year, run in a marathon with his mother in his honor, to celebrate him – and, of course, to raise money and awareness for Muscular Dystrophy. I’m calling it 100 Miles For Tanner, and it starts with the Tiarathon at Walt Disney World in March (GM Canada has graciously lent sponsorship support so that we can make a road trip of it and really make it an adventure for the cause.) Find out more about it at Their Bad Mother, where I’ll be posting about my progress. And maybe think about clicking through the links to support the cause.

Thank you, always, for your awesome.

This was the week that I let my Bad Mother flag really fly, I think. I mean, sure, I have, in the past, covered such established bad ground as spanking my preschooler and nursing another woman’s child and dressing my kid up as a Droog, but that ground is pretty well-trodden – doesn’t everybody use A Clockwork Orange as a reference when costuming their kids for Halloween? – and in any case,  I don’t think that you can really call yourself a bad parent until you start blaspheming Santa. Which I totally did.

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