This morning I'm running to the Coop before work to pick up milk (organic, duh), bread (high fiber), and eggs (brown) — essentials we're completely out of (because that's the kind of mom I am), and there's a man on 6th avenue walking a two-legged dog that has some elaborate wheeled contraption functioning as its back legs. And just two days ago, on the same kind of I'm-a-bad-unprepared-mommy errand, that time to Union Market (where we pay double the Coop prices for the convenience of professional cashiers and paying for our purchases on the same line where they were rung up), I see a different dog, another dog, similarly handicapped, similarly outfitted. Sure, we all love dogs, and some of us especially love special dogs. But is this the best way to display our legendary upper-middle-class bohemian brand of liberalism - by parading around parapalegic dogs attached to Rube Goldberg-esque jalopies? Especially because there's an inherent superiority to this display: Look at me! I've chosen the uncute to cuddle, the unlovable to love. I'm not just paying lip service to my ideals.

But I shouldn't be so hard on us Slopers. It isn't just dogs that earn our compassion; for example, most of usually give right of way on Seventh Avenue to that pain in the ass local kook, the woman in the motorized go-cart thing (the one who barks "Excuse me, Dear Sister" as she barrels past in her own wheeled jalopy, forcing small children to leap aside to safety) and hand her bottle after bottle of POM juice from the Coop refrigerator until you produce one that meets her exacting standards ("This one isn't filled to the top!" "This one's been opened!"). That's nice of us! It's a very trying situation to be in. Of course the savvier among us know to drag a tired toddler on a 3-block detour to avoid Dear Sister on the street, or opt to forgo milk for Baby to steer clear of her in Aisle One at the Coop. Sure we're bleeding heart liberals, but we're not goddamn saints.

Maybe a challenged dog affixed to a skateboard isn't such a bad representation of our politics, after all.

When ready to tie on the feedbag, the child scrabbles at BFF's chest with a sense of indignant entitlement, pushing up her shirt to her neck, exposing her braless breasts, and insisting that both nipples be bared in public — one for sucking and one for pinching and tweaking. On occasion she doesn't want the kid to nurse. So then come the negotiations: eat your lunch first, then you can nurse; take a nap, then you can nurse. You can't nurse now! Here's a fig Newman instead! I will not be surprised to some day hear, "Do your homework, then you can nurse." BFF's first child had full boob access until the child was three, and, I suspect, past that, on the down-low. In the interest of familial fairness, number 2 has been promised the same extended run.

Don't misunderstand me; I'm a 2-time Park Slope mommy; I did the do. And I'm still solidly on the pro side, theoretically. Organize a rally at in front of Chuck Schumer's apartment building on PPW to promote nationally legalized public breastfeeding, and I'll be there, shoulder to shoulder with my nipple-baring sisters. And I don't pretend I haven't discreetly lifted my shirt back at HQ. Truth is, I've bought the party line so much that when I see a newborn sucking from a bottle and not a flesh-enveloped mammary gland, I feel like I'm witnessing child abuse.

But I was sick to death of the sight of my own nipples by the time I'd closed up shop. I feel like I spend way too much time looking at this woman's nipples. They're more like wrists now. That's just not right. Please put them away. You're ruining it for everyone. Women's nipples are supposed to be a yearned-for destination, like, say, Venice, or Disneyland, not some completely de-eroticized subway station with free maps that everyone just passes through without noticing. Know what I mean? Dear BFF, don't turn our nipples into the F stop at 4th and 9th.

My child and I don't belong here. My kid is too big and I am too way past it all. While Two muscles by punier sub-peers on the flat metal thing that passes for a slide, I stand back and smile tightly at the few small gestures of friendliness directed my way. They sense I am not one of them. My kid is not wearing those $70 Italian shoes they sell at Peek-a-Boo kids, and I am not squealing with delight at the perfectly unremarkable lurching and babbling of their progeny. I do have an advantage: Since I don't have to interact much I can listen with a well-trained ear for subtext, and judge accordingly.

There's a mom in purple Crocs (a unfortunate trend this summer), and when she says to the mom in the brand-new Brooklyn Industries t-shirt, She is such a good walker — how old is she? I know she means "Shit, why isn't my kid walking?" and when she continues, And she's so verbal, too, she really means, "Shit, my kid's just past grunting" and when she says, Oops, she's got some dirt in her mouth, Croc Mommy manages to hide her glee, but what she's really thinking is "Ha! At least my kid doesn't eat dirt!"

Park Slope parents like to guffaw at the tales of Manhattan's competitive parenting that make front-page news in New York Magazine, and congratulate ourselves on staying out of that distasteful fray, but guess what, Tot Lotters, Park Slope's own little Nursery School Olympics is in your near future. Don't worry, it's really more like the Special Olympics. You know the Special Olympics, right? It's the one where everyone wins.

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I'm on line at the coop (when am I not on line at the fucking coop?), waiting patiently to pay for my Cascadian Farm organic fake Cheerios, and I overhear this primly-dressed mother (not your standard-issue coop type but apparently you can't judge a food fascist by her twin set) brightly offer her son soy chips. "No, thanks," he counters, "how about a granola bar?" (a snack that basically anywhere else in the United States would be met with hearty approval by so-called health-conscious parents) Her response? A curt, tight-lipped, no. No, to a request for a granola bar. Anybody's who's read one issue of Child magazine knows that this kind of food restriction is a direct highway to any number of life-long eating disorders. And I can guarantee you that as soon as this kid has $3 to his name, he's going to be at Maggie Moo's sucking down that radioactive blue cotton candy ice cream.

Later, I'm taking a walk in the meadow with a mommy I know and her chubby, ok, fat, baby, and as she pushes the stroller, she reaches down every few seconds and pops an animal cracker in the kid's mouth. Why?? a) he's not asking for a cookie, and b) he's fat! Maybe I could imagine a situation with a neurotically fussy eater who's also painfully skinny, and taking extreme measures by cramming pastries down his gullet, but why force-feed a fat baby? Even worse is the time I'm sitting with this mommy on the steps of the library, poor, hapless Porky strapped in the stroller, while she spoon-feeds him Annie's mac & cheese or whatever the hell. He's pushing her spoon hand away, clearly indicating "no more," and she holds his arm down the better to shove food in his mouth against his objections, like she's fattening a calf for slaughter. It's gruesome; I literally have to look away. The mommy's on maternity leave still from her job in non-profit, and it's my theory that she won't be going back anytime soon. She seems to gets too much perverse satisfaction out of controlling her stuffed piglet.

I'm so excited for the future of Park Slope, when everyone looks like they come from Cleveland.

Which is why we here at Gawker are pleased to inaugurate a new weekly feature, "Diary of a Park Slope Mommy." Childrearing has always been an important part of city life, never more so than now, when reluctant adults both refuse - and can afford - to leave the pleasures of New York. To learn what's going on in the minds of these people, we've found a willing diarist from the trenches of motherhood. Perhaps more importantly, she's from the trenches of the most smug, self-righteous childrearing section of New York: Park Slope.

"Diary of a Park Slope Mommy" will chronicle the angst, despair, and corrosiveness to the soul that raising children and living in Park Slope engenders. Our diarist, a working professional with two children who prefers to remain anonymous, will guide you through a world more horrifying than even your worst nightmares. If you have kids yourself, you'll find it a terrifying mirror of your own experience. After the jump, Park Slope Mommy introduces herself, establishes her credentials, and lets you know what you can look forward to in the coming months.

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When my roommates and I moved to Brooklyn post-college, almost 20 ago, we didn't know anything about neighborhoods - Park Slope or Carroll Gardens or Williamsburg; those names meant nothing to us. Brooklyn was just a nebulous blob of non-Mahattan-ness. A place you lived if you really, really, really couldn't afford the City.

Our first apartment was steps away from the irredeemably grubby Fourth Avenue, on the fringes of what I know now is Park Slope. Although the apartment was large and pretty nice, actually, the area - you couldn't call it a neighborhood - was seedy; genuinely, not in the quaint, romanticized way the Williamsburg pioneers will speak of their environs. For example, my gay roommate was routinely taunted through his first floor bedroom window by a neighborhood crack whore who had a summer residence on our block. A neighborhood crack whore; the block wasn't yet established enough for exclusive laborers.

When I eventually landed in Park Slope proper over a decade ago, it was a sort of dumpy middle class neighborhood with some appealing residential architecture, and only one decent restaurant.

I stayed and got married and had a baby and another baby. And somewhere in there, Park Slope became hot shit. I'm not sure which happened first: Al di La opened and got a rep as Manhattan-worthy; or word traveled across the river that if you were rich, you could live in an historic 3-story brownstone and send your children to public school instead of living in a 2-bedroom postwar shoebox and pay 100,000 per kid for private school. All I know is at some point soon after, you didn't have to give detailed directions to reluctant cab drivers coming from Manhattan any more, Jennifer Connelly and her family had moved in up the street, and there were a bunch of toy shops that looked just like the MoMA Design Store. And Marty Markowitz's wet dream had come true.

So here I am, the bitch in the brownstone, leaving my Maclaren at the bottom of the three flight walk-up. You know me: I'm the mom who lets her kids run untended through the Tea Lounge, while I sneer at your parenting; I'm the one at the Power Play birthday party who disapproves of the superhero-themed goody bags and the fruit-punch juice boxes; I'm the woman standing behind you in line at the Co-op, appalled at your choice of non-organic breakfast cereal. Face it: I've been judging you. These are your stories.