Am I That Odd?

So I'm practicing natural parenting. We use cloth diapers (except at daycare two days a week -- but I'm still working on our sitter), I prefer to wear my baby rather than to lug him around in a molded plastic bucket, he sleeps next to me in a cosleeper bassinet, and I'm gearing up to make our own baby food. The cloth diapers and the homemade baby food are things I've wanted to do for years, but the babywearing and the cosleeping are things that just evolved once our little guy arrived.

When I see people staring at my baby sling in the grocery store or our sitter asks incredulously "Where does he sleep?" after I comment on how he looks so tiny in her huge crib, I feel like I'm the only parent in the world doing these things. But then I hop online and find a huge population of mamas bucking tradition just like me. If I hang out there long enough I start to feel "normal," but then I get another rude awakening the next time Conner and I walk out the door.

I think part of it is that we live on the edge of suburbia, where SUVs and minivans reign supreme and you fit in with your neighbors by not rocking the boat. You can't care very much about what other people think in order to buck the majority in the suburbs. I get the sense that things are different in the city, where huge strollers aren't feasible in ancient third-floor walkups and everyone is crammed in so tight that they've learned to accept one another's differences.

Judging from the traffic on various natural parenting Internet hangouts, our ranks are growing. I can only hope that, by the time Conner is old enough to care about how weird everyone thinks his mother is, my style of parenting will be in vogue. Part of me worries about making his childhood more difficult by being "the crunchy mom" on the block, but another part of me asks "Isn't it your duty as a parent to embarrass the hell out of your children?"