Demon spawn! (Mr. Softee Florida)

It's one thing to stop for a pomegranate frozen yogurt on the way home from the park, but Park Slope parents have had it with those ice cream trucks that are always lurking around the playground. (And no, this has nothing to do with boycotting Israel.)

In true Park Slope fashion, parents have taken to the infamous Park Slope Parents blog to air their grievances with the trucks, The New York Post reports. And rather than teaching kids to deal with temptations and master their impulses, parents would like those temptations removed. Now! Please.

“Along with the first truly beautiful day of the year, my son and I had our first ruined day at the playground,” one Mom posted on the blog, according to The Post. “Two different people came into the actual playground with ice cream/Italian ice push carts. I was able to avoid it for a little while but eventually I left with a crying 4-year-old.”

To make matters worse, some parents are actually patronizing these horrible trucks—setting off a chain reaction of demands from every other child.

Kicking the trucks to the curb—one located far, far away from their multimillion-dollar brownstone—would seem to be the only solution. But one mother, whom The Post quoted anonymously to protect her from playground reprisals, offered a controversial alternative—that parents say "no" to the whining and begging.

“I say no to him all the time, and I feel his wrath. But he needs to hear that no,” the woman said, describing her highly unorthodox  parenting methods.

kvelsey@observer.com

The moment you realize you’ve become a cliche—strolling down upper Madison Avenue in your fur and turban, say, or arranging the artisanal cheese and pluot plate at the reception for the dystopian YA novel you Kickstarter-published—is a New York rite of passage. And there on I-95, as I sent in the $35 annual fee, I knew I had crossed the paper-thin threshold that separates the merely pretentious from the parodic: I had become the consummate SAHM (stay-at-home mom).

The only impression I had prior to joining Park Slope Parents—PSP, in the cloying message board slang that substitutes “DH” for “darling husband” and “BM,” somewhat confusingly, for “breast milk” (paging Dr. Freud?)—was that it was full of assholes.

Let me explain. The first time I heard of the group was in 2006, via a Gawker account of a fight among its members. A would-be good Samaritan wrote that she’d found a “boy’s hat” on the street and wanted to return it to its owner. A fellow PSPer replied to the message, taking offense at the “hurtful” sexism inherent in the assignation of gender bias to an item of clothing, which prompted a cross-fire of heated, essay-length exchanges from dozens of members until I can only assume that the original poster was by then committed to Bellevue.

I heard about PSP again last year, from a former member whose status had been revoked after she violated the list’s privacy policy by sharing excerpts of user emails on a snarky neighborhood gossip blog. I was intrigued by her expulsion. After all, if what happened on Park Slope Parents had to stay on Park Slope Parents--if not behind closed doors, then at least within the confines of an invitation-only Yahoo! group—I figured it had to be good.

Here I should admit that before I became a Park Slope parent, I was a Park Slope kid. When I was 8, my family moved to the northwestern corner of the Slope. It was the same year that The New York Times deemed the neighborhood a “Walt Whitman ideal,” although apparently no one had informed the prostitutes who still roamed my corner after-hours. We’d relocated from Austin, Texas, and my friends from the Lone Star state erroneously thought I’d moved to the tough-as-nails Brooklyn of Do The Right Thing and Moonstruck-era Cher, of stick ball and zeppoles and gang wars. "Have you held a gun yet?" they would whisper over the phone. "Have you gotten mugged?" But when I told them I lived in Park Slope, they changed their tune. "Have you had a cappuccino?" they'd ask breathlessly. "Can you tell us what spelt is?"

In my defense, for a long time, even as an adult, I resisted the Park Slope stereotype. I went to public school—the lesser public school (no hookers in the 321 zone)! I’m not a member of the Food Co-Op, because I’m too lazy, I don’t care which country my hummus comes from and I refuse to let anyone outfitted in a neon orange vest escort me home unless they’re an EMT and I’m unconscious. I’ve always defined myself as an outsider to the twee-hugging part of the borough. (For Christ's sake, technically I live in Prospect Heights.) But in the past few months I have come face to face with the distinct possibility that I’ve finally morphed into the species of specious Brooklynite I’ve always mocked simply by making use of my uterus, and allowing a child to do the same.

The evidence against me: Within a few weeks of my son’s September arrival—after enduring an unavoidable and punishing newborn boot camp that found me, most days, slumped on the floor frantically rocking my wailing baby while playing “Ocean Waves,” an iTunes download that sounded more like a shitty cellphone recording of an industrial dryer than the sea’s soft lullaby—I emerged to join the sun-washed masses of mothers and nannies who fill Park Slope’s sidewalks, outdoor cafes and playgrounds during working hours. The eyes of my non-parent peers tended to glaze over a few minutes into my new go-to conversation starter, a detailed update on the state of my infant’s bowel movements, but with my fellow moms I was preaching to the choir. Who would have thought that an apathetic agnostic like me would discover my congregation amid the Sisterhood of the Obstructive Stroller?

Yet at mother’s meetings and playgroups, over decaf lattes and pressed vegetable juices and the odd naughty noon glass of sauvignon blanc, my new clique and I chatted about sleep schedules (for the babies), kegels (for us), and up-the-back poops (hopefully for the babies, although postpartum incontinence loomed like a scatalogical specter), pausing every so often to absentmindedly free a breast from our shirts. (Incidentally, the list of people intimately familiar with my nipples—once limited to my college boyfriend, my gynecologist, and, due to an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction, my middle-school gym teacher—now included my landlord and at least a dozen area busboys). Every mom I befriended seemed to know eight others, and so on like a procreative pyramid scheme, at the apex of which presumably sat Eve, all by her lonesome, getting the side-eye at toddler yoga after word got out about Cain. And whenever I asked how two new mothers had met, the answer invariably led back to PSP. One woman assured me that it was a must for any mom worth her BPA-free playmat. “If it’s not on Park Slope Parents,” she said, “It’s like it didn’t happen.”

So I clicked. I signed. I succumbed. I opened my Gmail and waited to see what secrets my new identity might grant me access to.

Short answer: None. (In retrospect, the whole Yahoo! thing should have been a red flag. I mean, why not communicate via stone tablet or semaphore flags?) It turns out that the main perk of joining PSP is getting a frightening number of emails—hundreds a day—mostly consisting of classified ads pimping “lightly used” items such as a girls’—watch out, friend! Them’s fightin’ words!—faux-fur coat from a “pet, smoke, bedbug-free household.” By and large the exchanges are mundane. One thread that got a lot of traffic was titled “Re: Warning: Question About Baby Poop,”—no ER visit necessary, in case you were wondering.  At the end of my first week as a Park Slope Parent, my unread inbox count hovered ominously at 666.

The mark of the parenting beast close at hand, I scaled back to a daily digest.

(Photo via Getty Images)

"If you look at child-friendly parts of Brooklyn -- Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope -- those neighborhoods are beautiful and safe and the schools are great and that is good for our kids," (Michael) Moshan (a resident) said. "But is that good for us? We thought, if Williamsburg could mature into a neighborhood where kids can grow, then you've won."

Families are discovering that Williamsburg is much more than a playground for the postcollege, skinny-jeans set. The neighborhood has a few private preschools; several indoor play spaces; art, movement and music classes; and a number of children's stores, some of which were started by neighborhood parents. Many of the condo buildings rising all over the neighborhood feature playrooms, pools and other family-friendly amenities.

Even the Slope's babies-in-bars craze has come to the Burg.

The popularity shows in the numbers, too. A wide-eyed Journal article about the neighborhood's ascent points out that housing prices have risen 2.4 percent over the past three years--and a striking 30 percent in neighboring Greenpoint--while they have dropped 14 percent citywide over the same period. Even with the ugly, un-brownstone buildings, Williamsburg is hot, hot, hot.

Need more proof?

Artists continue to be harrassed out of the neighborhood by greedy landlords, and those who remain have gone crazy.

Consider the case of Michael and Hazel Fiore, a couple in their 50s who lived in a third-floor loft on Metropolitan Avenue, one of Williamsburg's main throroughfares. The Post reports that they are the first people to be indicted under a 2006 state law forbidding animal "hoarding." More than 100 cats were found in their apartment, a discovery that came after five of them fell through the rotting floorboards.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo