Almost every single one trip that I take ends with me whining ‘I didn’t take enough pictures.’ This road trip was no exception.

Most of the time my failure to photograph is due to either being too shy / too self-conscious to just dive in and take the photo. I know, I’m a freak. It’s why I did well at Disney World, and probably why my kid loves me.

Anyway.

This trip, I really made an effort to take more photos and while I did marginally better than I have on most of our travels, I still didn’t record enough of our second ‘These Women Must Be Insane’ road trip (courtesy of GM Canada — who deserve much thanks for believing in us enough to think we might not end up on the 6 o’clock news for leaving our children on the side of the I-75. You know, THESE children, who were determined to complete their own GM driver training so that they could overpower us and take the Traverse for themselves:)

Mind you, I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. After all, I did capture our very first ride together on the huge carousel behind the Cinderella’s castle:

and I also snapped a whole lot of sweet faces likes this:

And this:

And magical moments like Jasper on mom’s his iPhone relaxing after a hard day at Mickey’s office:

Note that there are next to no photos of the insane moms, save for ones like this:

I guess this just means we should do another road trip. Perhaps a spa trip just for the moms? Please? (A girl can dream, can’t she?)

I think that the most interesting thing about the trailer for the upcoming CBC documentary on hyper parenting (watch it after the jump) was the news that in some places 'helicopter' parents are referred to as 'curler' parents (as in curling, the winter sport; as in, presumably, 'sweeping away all obstacles so that one's giant puck-like children can skid freely across the ice toward a spray-painted bulls-eye future') and that those places are not Canada.

The mom giving her one year old a four thousand dollar birthday party? Eh, not so interesting. We know that there are such parents out there, somewhere. We don't know any personally, though. Isn't hyper-parenting, like, so Aughties?

Yeah. I'm glad that Carl Honore got over his issues around his son being gifted, but really: most parents experience some version of this at some point in their parenting career, probably more than once, and most parents know how to be mostly reasonable about it. We all have moments of wanting to give our kids everything, we all get confused about what 'everything' means, and we all worry and wonder about whether we're doing enough. We all want the best for them, but most of us do daily literal and figurative cost-benefit analyses of what, exactly, constitutes 'best' and most of us – I think – come down on the side of happy-healthy-loved.

Most of the discourse that I see, out here on the frontlines of the parenting blogosphere, focuses on exactly that: how to keep our eyes on that trifecta, how to learn to stop worrying and love the chaos and uncertainty, how to not sweat the small stuff and remain convinced that it is all small stuff. Sure, we're not always consistent – we get all angsty about issues concerning discipline and about whether or not it's really okay if we don't breastfeed and about whether some kinds of dancing are counter to feminist parenting and about whether all kinds of Barbies and princesses are counter to such parenting and so on and so forth – but really, are any of us (many of us?) bona fide hyper-helicopter-curlers anymore? Do any of us have the energy?

And: does it matter? I personally espouse the parenting philosophy of Enlightened Slacking, but if my neighbor wants to indulge in a bit of Helicoptering, who am I to say that there's anything wrong with that? That mom who wants to do the blow-out Princess bash for her infant daughter? If that makes her a happier mom, then more power to her. 

But someone should still tell her that hyper-helicopter-curling is so last decade. And if she needs convincing that bad is the new good and that it tastes better than overachievement, I've got the cheap-and-easy princess-cake-busting slacker-special Cinnabong recipe to prove it.

CBC, Dreamfilm Productions