Little star baby sling available at Mini Jake, minijake.com

Her habitats East Village, Fort Greene/Boerum Hill, Red Hook
Her profession profession Grants writer
Income $60,000
Her baby’s ride Little Star sling

HER HAUNTS

• East Village
• Fort Greene/Boerum Hill
• Red Hook

The Crunchy Mama’s image may be the easiest to conjure: She’s the one wearing flowy skirts, clogs and her baby in a sling for on-demand nursing. Her hair is either unflatteringly short (for styling ease) or creepily long, and she wears no makeup. (One veteran city baby nurse describes this mom as “looking Amish.”) The Crunchy Mama’s style may also be Afrocentric, with brightly colored caftans and chunky beaded necklaces. Either way, you can find her composting leftovers at the community garden, picking through dusty hardcover books left out at the curb or fighting with her pediatrician over vaccines. The rug rat strapped to her hip wears hand-me-down togs or a new think globally, act locally tee.

But although this recycling, vegan-cooking, co-sleeping, hemp-wearing woman is easy to type, she is difficult to spot in the wilds of New York City, where $30 entrées and million-dollar studio apartments make true hippiedom hard to maintain. However, this rare breed has given birth (at home and in the tub, natch) to a much more common subspecies: the Faux Crunchy Mama, who is really a Type-A Mom in green costume. The FCM is, in an ironic warping of the Original Crunchy Mama’s values, a hungry consumer of all things “natural” and environmentally friendly. Where the OCM purees her own peas, the FCM spends hundreds of dollars on flash-frozen organic baby food. Where the OCM cares little about her wardrobe, the FCM prefers the expensive bohemian-lite duds from Anthropologie. And true to her Type A self, the FCM can’t resist signing up for—what else?—mom-and-baby yoga.