My mom played the recorder. But not having electricity we had minimal exposure to music. As I got a little older we had Walkmans and things that were battery-powered but it would have been nice to be growing up in the iPod era. A tape only has six songs on a side.

For many women going back to work a few months after having a baby is overwhelming and unmanageable. As strange as it may seem things get even more difficult for a working mom after the second and third baby arrive. By that time the romance of being a modern 'superwoman' wears off and reality sets in.

Being a mom's so empowering and incredible. I'm one of those people who believes that life brings things to you at a certain time for a certain reason and if you just go with it that's where the best moments come from.

You don't realize how hard it is to live on your own. But there's no mom to do your laundry and make you dinner and to do things for you and you don't think about little things like buying paper towels and salt.

Many of my books come from what if questions that I can't answer things that I'm worried about as either a woman a wife a mom an American.

Imagine my surprise when after a lifetime of teaching me to keep personal things to myself Mom insisted my drawings were the start of a comic strip for millions of people to enjoy.

I'm more straightforward and I speak up more than I did before. When I was younger I wouldn't speak up as much but now that I'm a mom things have changed.

Every time I think I have something under control it changes and I don't have it under control. I think it takes several years to get there. Jade is 19 months old so right now I'm on alert all the time. And as a mom I think you're constantly worrying about things.

My parents are wonderful and I'm really lucky - but my mom has always been almost exclusively a right-brained person. She goes completely on her feelings of things on her intuition and so she instilled that in my brothers and I.

I make a lot of mistakes too and I'm constantly re-evaluating how I'm doing things and trying to be better every day whether it's as a mom or taking care of myself.