Alrighty then! The update that most of you have been waiting for, so long you stopped waiting! So huge, it had to be divided into two parts! Part the 2nd to follow in a few more days, after I plow through the second half of backlogged listings requests.

Since June of last year, comment moderation here at LesbianFamily.org has more or less gone into the deep freeze. For partial explanation, you may refer to the most recent post I did, Boo! At least that goes a ways toward trying to explain my own LesFam lethargy. That plus ye olde Parenting, which is a fairly time-consuming activity. The other LesFam administrators have been juggling new kids in their families, and/or work, and/or any of the other life issues that so often rear their heads.

This batch of folks have been waiting since October last year and before (!). Some are cross-listed, as you’ll notice. The next post will include folks who’ve waited to be listed since around mid-October (!).

Among the TTC folk, we have:

We also have a crop of Expecting blogs:

Several new Babies! blogs:

And Kids, both Little and Big:

Among the various pages listing families by type, we have new listings in:

Familia Lesbiana

Families of Color

Foster

Interracial Families

Multiples

And Single Parenting

You’ll notice that we’ve added a few categories under which you can list or cross-list your blogs. In the “Parenting by type” section, we’ve added “Single parenting” and “Families of color.” The site sprang up in August 2006, thanks to Liza taking the initiative and creating the resource she knew lesbian parents needed to find one anothers’ blogs online. But the parsing and sorting of the blogs has always (a) been voluntary, on the part of folks’ requesting listings, and (b) intended to evolve as you readers suggest more useful ways to look for and find one another.

The “Single parenting” comes from several new blogs by women single parenting, either by choice or by — whatever it is when it’s not choice. I added the “Families of color” category since, after multiple sessions wading deep into the site’s categories and cross-listings, it dawned on me that, duh: we have “Global” and “Interracial” families, but no place for women of color either single parenting or parenting with another woman of color to cross list. (!!) So (a) you may kick my ignorant, slow-on-the-uptake white arse, riiiiiight here. And (b) you may help spread the word among friends who might make good use of the listing.

Now! If enough of you (how many? who knows: ’spose we’ll know when we hear back) have objections to “of color,” and propose an alternative that works better, great! I’m a white gal whose coming of age as a thinking anti-racist person happened in California in the 1980s, essentially. For us out here, “people of color” was and still is a self-empowering term for people of African, Asian, Latin, and Native American heritage who wish, for purposes of political solidarity in any given instance, to refer to themselves as a group.

I just make this note because once, in a comment on some online article somewhere, someone objected to the term, finding it aligned with the archaic “colored,” from my father’s generation. Though for that matter, that term has different connotations for people in the UK and abroad than it does here in the US.

And finally! In an attempt to stem the relentless tide of spammy comments, I purged our “users” list of hundreds upon hundreds of what I thought to be bogus addresses. For my own blog, I always double check each one that seems to potentially be valid. But we had so very many, I just went with my gut. So! If your email address or user name had anything remotely to do with Viagra, or pharmacies, or businesses of many kinds, or emanated from Russia (sorry, but <.ru> is the locus of like 50% of all spammerosity, it seems), or had funny gobbilty-gookish words for your username, or had a funky email address that didn’t make sense relative to the gobbilty-gookish name, or, finally, just looked funny to my bleary eyes as my toddler sucked on my pinkie and we listened to Toddler Songs, for the gazillionth time: sorry, but you’ve been given the heave-ho! Please just sign up again.