I know, I know.

That sounds bizarre.

And vaguely offensive.

What I mean is I’m okay with who you are and your life choices and I want to make sure you know it…

Say you meet a new person, perhaps on vacation, and you suspect that he (or she) is gay. Which is A-OK with you. But they are going to great lengths to conceal this by aggressively hitting on members of the opposite sex, hiding the Barbara Streisand on his playlist or [feel free to insert your gay stereotype of choice.]

So you start to drop hints to communicate that should this person happen to be a boy who likes boys or a boy who likes girls, that you are fully accepting of homosexuality or heterosexuality or asexuality or WHAT HAVE YOU.

Oh I’m from San Francisco!

or

OMG I just loved Brokeback Mountain!

(or My Own Private Idaho if they also happen to be a hipster)

or

My friend and her dads are visiting me this weekend.

(Even if this is a complete fabrication and they are not coming to visit or you don’t have a friend with two dads or friends at all.)

Hopefully these little admissions will make the other person feel comfortable or intrigued or it might backfire and cause them to retreat slowly and un-friend you on Facebook.

Nowadays I find myself doing the same thing but not about who you choose to love but about how you choose to feed your child.

I’ll meet a new mom and I suspect she may be breastfeeding (or breastfeeding a toddler) and feeling weird about it or not breastfeeding and feeling guilty about it.

And I start to drop hints that communicate that I am A-OK with breastfeeding or bottle feeding or extended breastfeeding or exculsively pumping or hating pumping or WHAT HAVE YOU.

I made the funniest joke at this month’s La Leche League meeting.

or

You’re pumping? Kudos to you, pumping sucks! (rimshot)

or

I see that you are choosing [insert infant/toddler/etc feeding choice here] and that’s A-OK with me.

That last one might be kind of direct but effective.

Anyway internets what I mean is I’m okay with who you are and your life choices and I want to make sure you know it.

My sweet bloggy friend Nichole has this awesome gig writing for Babble’s Kid Scoop.

It’s awesome because she can share her wisdom with hundreds, nay thousands, nay trillions of Babble’s readers!

And yesterday she asked bloggers, like lil ole me, to tell her about their “I swore I’d never” parenting moments. You know all those rigid rules about the kind of parent you thought you would be that went out the window when you actually had kids.

I wrote about sugar, how I swore my kid wouldn’t be hopped up on sugar until she was old enough to understand it’s effect on the body and make educated decisions about consumption thereof.

I bet you’re wondering what food item Aliza is shoveling into her mouth in this here photo…yeah, it’s a cookie.

This got me thinking about all of the other things I swore I would never do/be/say/think when I was a parent.

I present to you my “I swore I’d never” list, brought to you by the letter C:

I swore I would never have a Cesarean section. I was going to have a natural birth! But things didn’t work out that way.

I swore I would always be Composed & Classy. I’m not sure why I thought that becoming a mother would transform me from sloppy to put-together, must be all that media influence, but it hasn’t, I live in “house clothes” and it ain’t pretty. These days I settle for clean underwear and a bi-weekly shower.

I just knew I would be Crafty. I was going to scrapbook every moment of my children’s lives! Blogging is like scrapbooking right? Confession: I also can’t sew, knit or crochet.

I swore I would never Conform to gender stereotypes. I was going to have gender neutral and unbiased toys. And I do. Trouble is she won’t play with the toy cars and insists on turning everything into her baby.

I had every intention of being Competent, I mean how hard could it possibly be to raise kids anyway? What I didn’t count on was that my brain wouldn’t regenerate after the placenta ate it…I’m not even sure how I’m able to finish typing this senten