Not two weeks ago I was sitting in a coffee shop near my home trying to force feed my child a gourmet vegetarian quiche, for I am a bougie hot mom who has deluded himself into thinking I'll be the one parent whose child does not subsist on chicken nuggets from the freezer.

I'm regularly told conflicting things about parenting a toddler. Half the internet has informed me my kid will go on hunger strikes so extensive that I'll be convinced the only way he's able to summon enough energy to draw a mural on our dining room wall with crayons (yes, this somehow happened recently) is that he has mastered human photosynthesis.

The other half of the internet insists in a tone that sounds like a threat that if my baby even sees apple juice, he and everyone he knows will die.

Then there's a third half of the internet that shouldn't even be mathematically possible that's just sad that our child doesn't have a Christian Mother. (To be fair, that third half of the internet doesn't believe in math in the first place.)

I place foods in front of this child every two hours and so far the only thing I've learned about his tastes is that he has a lot of them because I've yet to see him shirk a calorie. His belly hangs out of his shirts that can no longer contain it. My pediatrician told me that will go away soon since he's running all over the place now. I demanded she take it back and reported her to the Medical Board of Ethics of How Dare You (the official name of the professional licensing organization).

Skylar is on the anti-apple juice side of the internet, by the way, and he has refused to allow me to introduce joy into our child's life. Whenever I argue with him about any of this, he cites his credentials as a physician. If I had known his education was going to one day be used against me, I would have never paid his tuition. It cost $145,632.14 PER DAY. Every day. I had to pay it by 10:00 AM via venmo. The venmo account handle was @medicalskooooool;)lolrofl.

So anyway, I was feeding him a quiche that cost almost as much as medical school tuition when lo and behold, in walked two other hot moms with babies who also will never eat chicken nuggets.

Now, I am a man of the people. Meaning, I want to be among people at all times, always. What this means is being the stay-at-home working parent for nearly a year and a half with essentially no other hot mom friends in our area has been a trial and tribulation so heavy it counts as a tax write-off and a presidential pardon.

And so, when I saw two hot moms show up in Bougie Coffee Shop, I shot my shot and hit on both of them simultaneously. But, like, not in a sexy affair sort of way.

It turned out these two women had baby boys born within two weeks of my baby boy and both live near me. We exchanged phone numbers so we could immediately start texting one another things like "my child has drawn another wall mural and I don't even know where he's GETTING these crayons."

The crayon thing is real, by the way. This child should not have crayons. We never go a single second without at least one set of eyes on him. I have never seen him have access to a single crayon.

"STOP GIVING OUR TODDLER CRAYONS," I threatened Skylar with divorce recently.

"Don't be crazy," he told me. "I would never do that."

In a level neuroticism that can only be attributed directly to the Gay Agenda, I have painted over his artwork FOUR TIMES in the last month.

The following Saturday after meeting my hot new mom friends, I invited them to join me and West at a nearby park because if I had to spend one more second reading a Winnie the Pooh pop-up book that honestly has a really phoned-in plot, I was going to become a Christian Mother and start cosplaying as a potential human trafficking victim at my local Target.

One of the women was available, and minutes later, we strolled into a playground simultaneously, our two identical children with Irish last names dressed in the exact same outfit.

We laughed at the coincidence, noting too how odd it is that her child has the same uncommon first name we gave ours as a middle name.

Over the next thirty minutes, we discovered that not only do we have twin children who are dressed alike, were born at the same time, and have the same name, but she has the same job as me and her husband has the same job as Skylar. She's also from the same town where Skylar and I first met.

As I typed that out just now it occurred to me there is a good chance either she is stalking us or I am stalking her. I don't care either way as long as Lifetime pays us royalties.

Our grand plans to have our children play together, or at least side by side, turned into 45 minutes of the two of us sprinting in opposite directions across the playground to pull our babies out of rival mud pits, only to have them immediately pass like ships in the night to dive into the opposing pit. If this is the parallel play the internet moms have been telling me about, they forgot to mention it ends with having to cut your child out of his clothing with kitchen scissors and hose him down in a barn.

When West and I returned home, Skylar noted the general state of our Pig-Pen son and inquired.

"Did you have to take him in one of his cute outfits?" he asked, as I snuck West some apple juice.

Skylar sighed.

I began bathing our child and Skylar went back to whatever he was doing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him attempt to obscure my view as he retrieved a fresh set of crayons from a tote bag.

~It Just Gets Stranger