crunchier than grape nuts

I was recently invited to join a "Crunchy Moms Group" on Facebook. (If you don't know what that is, Google "crunchy mama". Yes, now. The rest of us will wait.)

Now that you know what a Crunchy Mom is, you should know ... I am not one. But I joined the group anyway, because it seemed like the polite thing to do.

I feel like such a fraud.

I am not crunchy; I'm caffeinated.

Crunchy moms are granola women who make their own soap and wear hand-made calico peasant skirts and love farm animals. They hug trees, listen to twinkle ding-dong music, go braless, and consider flip-flops as dress shoes. They braid their hair, bravely venture out in public without makeup, grow their own mushrooms, and clean their houses - and their bodies - with nothing but baking soda and vinegar.

I, on the other hand, wear deoderant. Yeah, the aluminum-laden, cancer-causing regular kind. I tried to give it up.

I ordered an all-natural, Jasmine-Lemon Grass Crystal Essence from hippiestuff.org. My bout with that lasted precisely 37 stinky days when I decided a long, healthy life ALONE, reeking of Jasmine-Lemon Grass BODY ODOR wasn't as fulfilling as the risk of a shorter pleasant-smelling life with an active social calendar.

Clearly, I am NOT a Crunchy Mom. Pseudo-crunchy at best, dipped in a little organic coconut oil.

Although, a couple of days after I joined the Crunchy Mom group, someone posted a "How Crunchy Are You?" quiz. (And you KNOW I can't pass up a good quiz.) Okay, so I was a co-sleeping, partial-cloth-diapering, non-vaxing, homebirthing, homeschooling, non-medicating, organic-baby-food-making, recycling rebel whose youngest self-weaned at 30 months. Oh yeah, and I'm a doula.

QUIZ SCORE: "Granola Earth Mama". The only thing that saved me from a perfect score of "Crunchier than Grape Nuts" is that I paint my toenails and shave my armpits.

Well, most of the time.

Still...L'oreal is my best friend, I haven't worn a peasant skirt since 1977, the only mushroom I ever grew was behind the toilet in our humid Georgia apartment, and thanks to Mary-Katherine Gallagher the thought of tree-hugging kinda freaks me out.

All things considered, maybe I am a little crunchy. Crispy perhaps. Half-baked more likely.

But for all of my truly crunchy friends out there, I AM proud to announce that I'm growing organic onions in my spring salad garden. Oh wait, that's not a salad garden... that's a flower bed.

Never mind.