I was thinking about sitting down and giving myself a break from getting ready to move. I was going to whinge a bit about getting ready to move and the many woes that are me and my many recent moves.

But then I found out that my friends Michel and Astrid just had a baby girl six weeks before her due date. So instead of whining, I will get my priorities straight, say a prayer for all them, and get back to packing.

I’m not much of a magazine reader. I’m a big reader. An avid reader. Some might even say a voracious reader. I average about 2 or 3 books a week. But I don’t read a lot of magazines.

From time to time, Michael points me in the direction of an article he thinks I’ll enjoy, and once or twice a year I treat myself to an evening of celebrity fluff and cheap wine. As a general rule, though, there’s only one magazine I read cover-to-cover on a regular basis. I subscribe to Today’s Parent because I’m soooo cool. I like Today’s Parent for a few reasons. For one, it’s Canadian, so it has more geographical relevance than many other publications. For another, parenting issues generally have more significance to my daily life than who is sleeping with Jennifer Aniston or what length of skirts they’re wearing in Paris. Also, I love reading “expert advice” on common problems and learning that I’m doing something right. In case you didn’t know, mothers in their thirties give nineteen-year-old single girls a serious run for their money in the whores-for-affirmation department.

Anyway, I keep the current issue of Today’s Parent on top of the laundry hamper in the bathroom, and peruse it in my rare moments of peace and quiet. The July issue arrived last week, and I started with the cover stories that grabbed my attention, and then went back to begin at the beginning.

In the Mailbag department, there is a letter emailed in by a gentleman named Doug Hyde. Mr Hyde has his knickers in a twist about the under-representation of fathers in the magazine’s depiction of parents. He writes: “It’s no wonder you call your magazine Today’s Parent because that’s all you portray: one parent. Jamie Sale on May’s cover is the latest example.” He goes on to describe how he is a committed and involved husband and father, and describes these relationships as an “honour and privilege.”

Now, I feel for Doug. Often, “parenting” issues really means “mothering” issues, and fathers get left in the cold. I think, though, that he maybe missed the moment for making his point. When actually reading the article about Jamie Sale, it turns out to be an interview with both her and her husband and skating partner, David Pelletier, and describes a very balanced and equitable parenting partnership.

What really makes me think Dougie missed his mark with his letter, though, is the statement of the May issue’s theme in big white block letters next to Ms. Sale’s head on the cover: MOMS SPECIAL. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not convinced that Mother’s Day is the best time to complain about people saying too many nice things about mothers.

I wonder how many people were offended by June’s Dads We Love feature?

Rowan looks nothing like me. She’s a tall leggy blonde with dinner-plate sized baby blues. She’s also unlike me in many other ways, and a lot of the time, I just don’t get her. But there are moments when she says or does something that makes me exclaim, “That’s my kid!” One of those moments came during the very early hours of a morning this week.

I’m a morning person. My mother is a morning person, too, but there is a line that defines when “morning” begins. I put that line at about six o’clock. There are rare occasions that necessitate getting up before six. I’ve had jobs that require getting up before six on a regular basis, and I’ll do it if I need to. I’ll even do it fairly cheerfully if I can start with coffee and a little bit of quiet. But left to my own devices, I will define six as the start of the morning, and any earlier as the middle of the night.

My mother has a similar definition of the beginning of the day, and we frequently have a quiet coffee together before anyone else is up when we are under the same roof. We have not, however, always had such a symbiotic understanding.

On the Canadian Prairies, the light changes dramatically with the seasons. In winter, the sun is not up until after eight am, and goes down again around four in the afternoon. In the summer, it begins to be light before four am, and stays that way until after ten at night.

There is a reason that my mother started calling me “Sarah Sunshine” when I was very young, and it’s not entirely to do with my cheery personality. I respond to light. I have trouble motivating myself when it is grey and gloomy, and I need less sleep in the summer when it seems like day lasts longer. That has always been the case. One of my Mum’s favourite tales of the woe involved in surviving my childhood is how I used to get up with the sun. At four. In the morning. And then I would come running into my poor tired mother’s room, hollering in my sunny way, “Mummy Mummy! It’s morning it’s morning!” and my mother would reply (quite appropriately, I might add), “No it isn’t. Go away.”

I live further North now than I did in my early childhood, and that means (you guessed it) even more light. Earlier this week, my sleep was disturbed by the change in the darkness that indicates the bathroom light has been switched on, and the pitter-pattering of someone going about their business. I looked at the clock and noticed it was 3:42. I looked at the hall, and noticed Rowan was heading to the living room. I got out of bed and suggested that she should return to her room. She looked at the blinds with the light coming around the edges, and said, “But it’s morning.” And I said, “No it isn’t…” and caught myself just in time. I mumbled some half-assed explanation about the sun getting up before people in the summertime and sent her back to bed.

But the sun will get her. Even though she sleeps with a lamp on all night in her room, Rowan has a thing in her that she got from me that sets a zing in her brain when the sun crosses the horizon. This morning, I got up at six, and found her curled up on the couch, wrapped in her quilt, sound asleep. I have no doubt that she hopped out of bed at 3:30 and set out to wait for the family. As it was, the rest of us just shoved her out of the way and started our day around her sleeping form until she got caught up on rest.

In one week, it will be the Summer Solstice. I am considering finding a Pagan ritual to attend, if there is one around here, so I can give thanks for the turning of the light tide. I am not feeling remotely sad about the lessening of the light. Rather, the longest day of the year just means to me the middle of the night with the most four-year-old in it.