Anyone who has taken a Women’s Studies course in college learns that gender is a social construct -- that from Day One, girls are dressed in pink, handed dolls, and expected to be sweet and pretty. Boys are wrapped in blue, given toy cars, and taught to be tough.

But anyone who has kids knows that that’s a big blue truck full of crap. My sons can stare at pictures of tractors, monster trucks, diggers, excavators, concrete crushers, fire engines, police cars, mobile cranes (you get the idea) in a book for hours. Sure, they’ll accept a baby doll and pretend to feed it a bottle…for about half a minute. Then they club the poor thing on the head with a truck. Every parent I know has something similar to say about the gender-based leanings of their kids.

But still. This story about a Swedish couple who refuses to identify their toddler’s sex, in hopes of letting the child grow up without the limits of either gender, gave me pause. Only a few people who have changed Pop’s diaper (yes, the child’s name is “Pop”) know the truth. “We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother has said, according to The Local, a Swedish news site.

The ethics of this “experiment” aside, it reminded that me every parent has a different agenda when it comes to nurturing (or not) their child’s gender identification. This family has taken an extreme stance against what they believe to be stereotypical socialization, but many parents I know also go out of their way to steer clear of the whole pink-blue juxtaposition, disavowing anything princess-y for their girls and enrolling their boys in dance classes.

And as much as it seems obvious to me that my sons are “boy boys,” this story made me own up to my own weird ideologies. My wife, Emily, and I are raising our twin sons as two moms. Ever conscious that there still remains a degree of bias against our family in this country, I often (and this is the first time I’ve even admitted this to myself!) dress them super boyish, so as not to give anyone any ammunition against the idea of two women raising boys. I think I’m unconsciously afraid that people will think we’re “turning” our sons gay if I dress them in pink or if they’re seen playing with a doll in public. Ridiculous, right? Right or wrong, I think we all have our fears and prejudices that influence our parenting decisions.

Not sure where I’m going with this, but I’d love to hear what everyone thinks and how you handle you encourage or discourage or ignore gender stereotypes. Maybe Pop’s parents have a point?

As someone who breastfed twins, I have some advice for the new octuplet mom who plans to breastfeed all eight of her hungry little cherubs: Don’t bother with shirts. It’ll be way easier. Besides, she won’t have time for that painstaking process of pushing her arms through sleeves anyway. Here’s why:

We know her preemies won’t be nursing just yet, but she plans on giving them expressed breast milk while they’re in the NICU. Which means she and her pump will soon be attached at the, um, boob. Conventional wisdom says to pump as often as your baby (or babies) would feed so that your supply can match their demand.

Let’s do the math here: An average newborn needs to eat about 8 times a day, but since she’ll eventually be able to breastfeed two babies at once, that’s a mere…32 pump sessions a day. She might as well strap the contraption to her back and secure the breast shields to her chest with duct tape. She might also want to give her pump a nickname (I affectionately dubbed mine Van Helsing) to bring them closer.

But don’t just take my advice. Here are 12 other ways she can prepare for the daunting task ahead of her. The reward? Everyone -- including me -- will bow down at her bloated feet and wonder how in the world she does it.

It's my birthday today (I'm 32), and I just got the best present ever. Every two weeks, the doctors do a growth scan of the babies, which gives us an estimate of their individual weights. The last time they were measured, each baby was barely more than four pounds. We want them to gain as much as possible so they can avoid time in the NICU; babies less than five pounds are often automatically sent there. So my hope for today was that they'd break the five-pound mark. But the ultrasound technician delivered different news: Baby A is 5 pounds, 10 ounces, and Baby B is six pounds! Six pounds! I cry with pride and relief. The ultrasound technician, Beulah, an angel to me now, congratulates me.

I congratulate myself, too. I'm carrying nearly 12 pounds of baby inside me! All those hamburgers paid off.

One of the nurses just came in to take my temperature and draw some blood. As she prepared the needle, she complained to me in a hushed tone about some of the Hispanic patients on the floor.

"Why do they always call each other 'papi'?" she asked.

"We don't do that," she said, and by "we," I knew she meant us white people, as if I would automatically agree because of the color of my skin.

I can't believe I've made it two weeks in the hospital. I wasn't sure I could. But just for the record, I still hate it here.