Welcome to Offbeat Mama!

Break out the cigars — Offbeat Mama is finally born! We're so excited to have you here with us. You're looking at almost three months of tinkering and geeking out — take a look around, do a little reading, and let us know what you think.

And if you like what you see, you can use the little ShareThis icon over there to share Offbeat Mama via Twitter, Facebook, email, your blog, or a bunch of other ways. Please oh please help us get the word out!

But "us" is very much also YOU — Offbeat Mama isn't intended to be my personal mommyblog — it's a community site to celebrate your offbeat mama voices! That in mind, we want to get you involved:

• If you're a writer or blogger, we'd love you to submit a guest post. Oh and hopefully within the month, we'll have a offbeat mama blogger planet for you to join.
• If you're a photographer who has maternity shots of nontraditional mamas, badass baby photos, or caters to alternative family portraits, we'd love to feature your work. If you're on flickr, you can add your photos to the Offbeat Mama pool. If you're not on Flickr, you can submit your stuff using the form over here.
• And if you're a indie business owner (yes, Etsy sellers: that means you!) who sells stuff like maternity clothes that don't suck, gender-neutral baby onesies, toys made from stuff other than Chinese plastic, or other cool shit, you really should check out our launch promotional ad rates.

Very special thanks artist Ellen Forney (y'all may remember her work on Offbeat Bride) for defining the Offbeat Mama characters and doing the illustrations for the top of the site. And quadruple thanks to my tireless Offbeat CTO, jmdodd, for helping me code and code and code. Somehow this woman has four children AND managed to birth the systems that make Offbeat Mama tick.

Those of you used to Offbeat Bride should find the structure of Offbeat Mama pretty familiar, but get clicking and if you've got bug reports, questions, whatever, let us know!

And if you want to keep up with us, be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed, follow @offbeatmama on twitter, or friend us on Facebook. We'll have at least one post five days a week!