Brain, Child is a parenting magazine for the rest of us: it's not filled with how-tos about baking the perfect cupcake or crafts to do on rainy days or moronic advice that's the same-old same-old. Instead, it is filled with essays by real parents with real lives - people with quirky and problematic children who don't always do everything right. I've been a subscriber since its beginning and it has never failed to make me think.

Here's the first part of their mission statement:

When we sat down to introduce our new magazine, we realized it would be easy to slide into the tradition of comparing a creation of the mind to the creation of a child. "Ah," we might intone, "our baby was conceived in passion and spent many long months in careful gestation. Towards the end, there were many sleepless nights. The labor was rough. But," we'd sigh, "when they placed that first precious issue into our hands, we saw that it was all worth it . . ."

On second thought . . . no. Motherhood is more than a cute metaphor. And a magazine is nothing like a child. A magazine doesn't try to put bits of American cheese in the VCR. A magazine doesn't make that beautiful sleeping child face. A magazine doesn't worry you with a high fever. A magazine doesn't neck on your couch.

Amen, sisters. As adoptive parents, heck - as parents! we know that our children are unique and different. Some of us have children that are especially unique and different. So many of the current parenting magazines treat their readers as if they're all the same. Magazines like Parents regurgitate the same old advice they've gotten straight from the parenting "experts" who deal with the masses, and even a more fringe parenting magazine like Mothering makes certain assumptions about its readers that may or may not apply to everyone reading it.

One thing I really, really appreciate about Brain, Child is the differences of opinions and viewpoints that regularly crop up in its pages. It's not that they're trying to be PC and cover all the bases - they do have a pretty liberal slant -- but they tolerate differences of opinion and actually print them.

I heart Brain. Child!

And if I haven't convinced you to get yourself a subscription yet, here's more from their mission statement. They so it so much better themselves:

Brain, Child treats motherhood as a subject worthy of literature. And in the best tradition of literature, it celebrates the diversity of mothers and their styles. Our essays and features address readers as thinking individuals, not just medicine- dispensing, food-fixing, boo-boo-kissing mommies. We think of it this way: When our mothers wanted to hash over the important stuff with their girlfriends, they'd say to us, "Honey, the grown-ups are talking." Brain, Child is like that: the place where grown-ups are talking.

Brain, Child cuts past a lot of the bull to get to the voices that are truest -- not experts, but women who are or have been there. We gave Brain, Child the subtitle "The Magazine for Thinking Mothers," but it could just as easily have been "Motherhood The Way It Really Is." Our writers bring a down-to-earth perspective to traditional and not-so-traditional parenting subjects. And they're willing to address the big questions -- our evolving identities as mothers, for instance, or what we're teaching the next generation.

Brain, Child is a community, although we're wary of the term. (It's not, for instance, the kind of community where everyone sits around and sings friendship songs while secretly hating each other. Or the kind of community where women with nothing else in common compete in the baby-with-the-earliest-tooth or teen-with-the-tidiest-hair contest.) You know that friend you call when you're upset and just the sound of her voice calms you? You know those friends you go out to dinner with and stay long after dessert, talking and laughing, until the waiter kicks you out? It's that kind of community.

We aim to be down-to-earth, literary, commonsensical, neither too establishment nor too crunchy, funny, poignant, honest, respectful, irreverent, relevant, intelligent. We don't have any particular agenda, except to support thought and debate on topics of interest to mothers.