Okay, it’s only March, but the search for Mother of the Year is over. All you Alpha Moms and Alpha Mummies can just pack it in and turn into Roseanne for the rest of the year, because single mom Marjorie Jean-Baptiste of Montreal has thrashed all possible or conceivable challengers completely.

From the CBC:

A Montreal mother of seven saved the lives of her children by throwing them out the window of a burning building on Thursday night.

The 34-year-old woman and her children, who are all between the ages of two and 10, were inside their east-end apartment on Élie-Beauregard Street when a fire broke out on the building’s ground floor just before midnight.

Firefighters report that, while there were two fire alarms in the building, neither appeared to work. Time to take five minutes make sure yours are working properly, no? We’ll wait till you’re done.

As flames and smoke spread in the building, the mother gathered her children at a second-storey window.

By the time firefighters arrived, responding to a neighbour’s 911 call, she had thrown six of her children into a snowbank about five metres below, and then jumped with her youngest child in her arms.

“By doing what she did, she saved her family,” said paramedic Bart Paranello. “She saved her kids. She’s a hero.”

You can say that again. Seven times.

Ahhh, who doesn’t love art?

Certainly not this museum-loving gal, who has been known to just sit and stare at paintings and sculptures in complete awe.

As any mother of a preschool-aged child can tell you, your exposure to art increases tenfold once the kid learns how to hold any type of writing/coloring instrument. It starts first with adorable little squiggles, which you praise highly in order to reinforce the idea that creating art is a good thing.  And also to encourage the perfection of that grip upon the writing instrument.

So then your child gets the idea that everything they do is this fantabulous piece de resistance that needs to be displayed on the wall or the refrigerator.  Well, at least mine did.

Therein lies the quandry. Whither all that art?

I know some moms who have kept practically everything their child has created, whether it took 30 seconds or 20 minutes.

And those moms have also seriously thought about renting extra storage space to hold it all.

Would it be so bad to tell the child that the hastily scribbled “rainbow” does not even compare with the very detailed treasure map and that they are indeed not equal in execution or result?

After some heavy pondering and surreptitious dumping of artwork while the Munchkin was asleep, I decided to involve him in the process. This was for two reasons, the first being that I felt horribly guilty putting his drawings in the trash as well as the desire for my vacuum to not get crowded out of the hallway closet.

The other day we were cleaning out the car, which becomes an involuntary repository of all the school art projects, and I allowed him to pick the items he wanted me to keep and which ones were not worthy of immortality.

And wouldn’t you know, for the most part he chose the projects that were thematic and time-consuming to produce.

Now, if only I could get his permission to ditch the highly unflattering portrait he made of me for Mother’s Day last year in which he proclaimed I was 100 years old, all would be good.