daily: Browse The Strips

Friday January 3, 2020

Lynn's Comments: I was treading some sensitive ground here when I wrote this. Midwifery was still a developing career, and home birth was still being discouraged. Expectant parents were, for the first time, taking control of how and where their babies were going to be born.

Monday January 6, 2020

Lynn's Comments: At the time I was formulating this story, there was some debate regarding midwifery and the decision to have your baby at home. My own obstetrician, Dr. Murray Enkin, advocated for home birth and I wanted to champion his ideals.

Tuesday January 7, 2020

Lynn's Comments: Dr. Enkin was the author of several obstetrics text books and his opinion was: "Childbirth isn't a disease and shouldn't necessarily happen in a hospital." This was something I believed, too.

Friday January 10, 2020

Lynn's Comments: I engineered this "birth" to happen on April Fool’s Day because it was a fantasy situation—I wasn't really pregnant. But at this stage of the story, I hadn't decided on a name or a gender. (You have a lot of control over people when you make them up!)

Monday January 20, 2020

Lynn's Comments: This story gave me the opportunity to add something "Canadian" to the strip. One of my editors originally tried to discourage me from doing this, saying he wanted it to be seen as an American family. I refused to omit Canadianisms, and the result was that folks in the US enjoyed the chance to tell me about their trips to Canada, and Canadians appreciated the reference.

Wednesday January 22, 2020

Lynn's Comments: Whenever one of the kids was feeling left out or otherwise marginalized, we declared a special day just for them. We’d go to a favourite restaurant, maybe supply a small gift. We just made a special day out of an ordinary one. Worked like a charm.