If there's a time of the year during which it's hard to be green, this would be it: the holiday season is a season of consumption. There's just no getting around it: regardless of what winter holiday you celebrate, you invariably spend December (and, if we include Thanksgiving, November) (and if you're Canadian, October) eating and drinking and shopping and eating and drinking and eating and did I mention eating? And odds are that you're not sticking to your locavore diet (because, my god: eggnog without rum?), and not restricting your shopping list to locally made goods.

Yesterday was - how do I say this without risking profound understatement?

The other week, when John McCain got all dismissive about women's health during the presidential debate and kept waving his fingers around making sarcastic air quotes - or, as Jon Stewart correctly referred to them last night on The Daily Show, "dick fingers" - I thought that my head was going blow off. "Women" use "health" as an excuse to get abortions? This is something that the "extreme pro-abortion movement" uses as a ploy to promote abortion? "HEALTH"?

Is it just me, or does it seem that every time a celebrity (or politician: coughJOHNMCCAINcough) opens his or her mouth about anything related to health or parenting, they say something stupid?

It's Love Your Body Day. That's a good thing, and, also, a very, very sad thing.

We tend to be pretty quiet up here in Canada. You'd hardly know that we have an election coming up, for example. Nor is it obvious that we spend a lot of time worrying about things like the environment and our children and when the hell the Stanley Cup is going to take its rightful place in Toronto. (I kid! It would also look very nice in Vancouver!) You'd hardly know that we can get pretty gung ho about causes. Which is why it's time to remind you all about BlogHers Act Canada.

This just in: childbirth can be traumatic.

I gave birth six weeks ago. Since then, I've lost a lot of the baby weight. Partly because the baby that I was carrying was so huge that his expulsion from the womb represented a massive weight loss, and partly because I've hardly been able to eat anything since he was born, what with his unremitting need to be held ALL THE TIME HOLY HELL. Hardly anything but cookies, that is, and maybe the odd bagel or two. Which, you know, is not the best post-partum diet.

Every time I open the newspaper or click open a news feed these days, my heart breaks. Breaks. War, crime, natural disaster: there's always something. And in recent days in particular, with the death toll in Burma climbing while authorities there continue to stymie aid efforts, and now the earthquake in China... I can barely stand to open the newspaper or follow the news links because I know that I'm going to have to hold my breath and press my fists to my eyes to keep from crying.

Narcissists, my ass. Bloggers are the new social movement, the swelling wave of social change, the next generation of activist-artists who put their figurative money where their literal keyboards are.

It's April now, which means that it's officially spring. (I know: spring officially begins in March. But does anyone actually buy that? APRIL is the month of daffodils and crocuses and spring rain and green.) Which means gardening and spring cleaning and breathing in the fresh clean goodness of an earth renewing itself. Which means: EARTH MONTH.

Like I don't already have ten gajillion things to worry about as a pregnant mother. Toxins in my daughter's toys and sippy cups. Toxins being blown around by garbage incineration.