It turns out that the jumbo skill gap reflected in our wee parenting circle isn't a freakish anomaly but a familiar tableau: Studies worldwide reveal that today's homosexual totally kicks straight butt when it comes to roosting and rearing -- in categories of competency and nurturing.

Gillian Dunne, senior research fellow at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics, recently unveiled her study indicating that queer British dads are more compassionate toward their kids than their straight stiff-upper-lipped rivals. She found that gay men are "interested in extending their masculine identity to embrace nurturing qualities ... and they felt that one great gift they brought to the children was a sense of tolerance."

Gay papas also had "homes organized around commitment to children, with 25 percent of those surveyed working less than 30 hours a week." Dunne's evidence duplicates the findings of one study in 1989 and two in 1990 conducted in the United States that commended gay dads' abilities.

Dunne's discovery arrives five years after the American Psychological Association published -- upon review of extensive research evidence dating back 40 years -- a finding that there appears to be utterly no disadvantage rendered to children raised by gays and lesbians, and several distinctive enhancements. Despite bigoted fear of "butches," research indicates that lesbians are as maternal as heterosexual women, and, surprisingly enough, the children of lesbians exhibit more "psychological femininity" than kids with hetero moms.

Studies additionally assert that the sexual orientation of moms or dads has no impact on their kids' sexuality, gender identity or any other aspect of their psychological and emotional development. Children of gays and lesbians form friendship bonds with their peers as easily as kids of straights do, despite the harassment and teasing that the former group is subjected to. A 1994 study conducted by Charlotte Patterson of the University of Virginia also revealed that children of lesbians exhibited "a greater overall sense of well-being" than kids of heteros, perhaps because their moms forced fewer "sex-typed" preferences upon them.

Recent judicial decisions, like the ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court that lesbian couples can put both their names on their children's birth certificates, sanctify these findings and, at the same time, make it easier for gay parents to show the rest of us how it's done.

My wife and I are the token straights in this nursery network. We slipped in because I'm the sperm donor for Nathan, the lanky son of Monica and Rachel, who is just 19 days older than Tallulah. We want our half-siblings to play together so we recruited additional lesbian babies -- Agnes, who is 15 hours older than Tallulah, and Elizabeth, a precocious 4-month-old -- to fill in the gaps in our complex two-tots-per-hour, 45-hours-per-week schedule.

Chinese Agnes was catalyzed by top-quality "stranger semen" that her moms purchased from a sperm bank for $150 per 1 cubic centimeter (more than 25,000,000 spermatozoa guaranteed), while Elizabeth was begat with beat-off assistance from a het pal named Dan. (A spokeswoman at Pacific Reproductive Services, a sperm bank in San Francisco owned and operated by lesbians, estimates that half of all lesbian-conceived babies are test-tubers, with the remaining percentile evenly split between gay and straight wanking donor-buddies.)

The four babies will congregate each weekday at Thea and Darcy's house in the Castro District and be cared for by Consuelo, a nanny who, when told by the lesbians in the group that all their babies had "dos mamas, no papas," replied: "God blessed them." Carol and I are ecstatic to be included in this collective, but we're embarrassed that we appear to be so completely outclassed.

Ren, who happens to be the author of "The Lady Mechanic's Total Car Care for the Clueless," addresses my humiliation and the supernatural adroitness of lesbian moms.

Order "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" from the editors of Mothers Who Think.