2009′s Pride in Baguio City saw the 15th anniversary of the first LGBT Pride March in the Phillippines and Asia, notes this piece in Tinig.com.

We pluck gems like these from images marked “public” over at the LesbianFamily photo album over at Flickr. Add yours there and be famous for fifteen minutes! Or, in the case of our November family, months, if we’re slow to update!

Above, please give a warm LesFam hello to DJ Rebel and her family, from brrtha’s Flickr photostream. This is from Santa Cruz, CA’s LGBT Pride back in 2007.

As we mentioned on our October 21 post below, we cull these “Picture of the Week” images from the various photos (marked as “public”) in the LesbianFamily.org Flickr group .  If anyone’s face is in the image, we ask in advance to cross-post here, and will attribute as you specify. If you want us to link to your blog, we’ll gladly do so!  Consider hooking up with Flickr if you haven’t already. It’s free if you don’t upload a ton every month. And no, this is not a paid product endorsement. Oh, for the ethical quandary of an offer for a paid product endorsement.

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News! We’ve got our first post-hiatus updater! PurpleLaurie55 wrote to say that she’d like her blog, Creating A Miracle, to be moved from “Expecting” to “Babies!” Which is now where you’ll find it. Congratulations, PurpleLaurie!! She also asked to have her wife’s blog, Mommies Making Miracles, to the “TTC” page. Done! Now go visit ‘em, folks!

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Help! This brave updater gives us the opportunity to query those of you who list your blogs here and are reading this: can you let us know if we should nudge your blog from one page to another? What with the onward march of time marching your kids or your family-making process along? Ideally we’d have a fleet of paid editorial staffers combing the blogosphere for new blogs to recruit, checking on the status (still publishing? needing a shift in listing?) of the blogs currently listed here. Clearly we are lacking a fleet of paid editorial staffers, and so rely on you, the dedicated Lesbian Family readership community, to help focus our To Do list.

Updating and status-checking would be most obviously needed for the TTC page (55 of ‘em!), the Adoption page (17 of em! though most post-adoption, some are about the journey), the Expecting page (25 of ‘em, pretty durn time-dated!), and the Babies page (118 blogs, people! mother of god that’s a lot of babies!). I’m no mathematician, but that makes around 215 blogs in need of a status report.

These are only four out of the 20 pages we keep here at Lesbian Family, but they’re four of the most action-packed and fun/drama-filled. As any of you know who’ve trod this path before, it takes us SO G_D D_MNED much effort to make our families in the first place, and the first several years are a mix of shock, amazement, sleep-deprived hallucinatory delerium, and sincere hunger for a CLUE from a trusted source. The stories we tell about our lives are not simply entertainment, but MAP-MAKING for one another on (for most of us) the very most important journey of our lives. Please pardon the all caps but I feel just a tad strongly about this.

If any of youse wanted to adopt a page, even for this one-time clean-up sweep, we’d be hugely grateful. Just send us a note on this post, so nobody duplicates anyone’s efforts. The main things we’d want to know:

1. Blog no longer publishing? Let us know & we’ll nix it. Still publishing? Then:
2. Obvious change in status of family? What page should the blog be listed on now? After this, then also:
3. Is the blog redirecting to a new URL? Or is there a final post directing to a new URL? We’d love to update links.

All of this is about directing traffic and connecting good people to good people, all in the service of love-love-love! for lesbian families and the stories they’re telling about their lives. A sincere thank you in advance for any help you can give us.

Happy Halloween! From Tracy & Mia’s Flickr photostream.  This image was taken in October 2007, so the cutie pie in the middle is just a weeeee bit bigger now. Like, four big years old.

And this one’s this week’s. “Me & My Moms,” from Phlora’s Flickr photostream. Anyone who keeps pictures on Flickr and includes a public photo in the LesbianFamily.org Flickr group (see that “Family Album” bit in the right-hand column down there?) is fair game, we say. (We ask in advance to cross-post here, if anyone’s face is in the image.)

The rag-tag skeleton crew managing and posting here (again: no Halloweeen pun intended) has been distracted by the business of parenting.  But we’re easing back up the onramp by (1) weeding through the 12, 643 as-yet unmoderated comments (any guesses as to which among these are not spam?), and (2) gloating over the fact that we finally (FINALLY!) snatched the URL <LesbianFamily.com>. It was heretofore wasted er, unappreciated by some overseas webmaster who was using it as a portal for, er, fairly salacious content. No salacious content here, folks! Unless you think ovulation cycles or adoption proceedings or spit-up rags are salacious!

So if you’re here because you went to your old familiar portal “LesbianFamily.com” and are surprised at what you find, well, BOO!  If you are here as an old chum the old fashioned way (via “.org”), welcome back. We hope to get ourselves back up and running again in proper fashion soon.

Pictured above: (L-R) Deb Rox, who blogs at Deb On The Rocks and pretty much obscured by L-Word creator Ilene Chaiken (foreground, in white jacket), LesbianFamily.org founder Liza Barry-Kessler, who blogs at Liza Was Here, Paula Gregorowicz,who blogs at The Paula G Company and at BlogHer as a Contributing Editor, and Zoe Gaymo,who blogs at gaymo and at BlogHer as a Contributing Editor.

Chaiken spoke at one of the keynotes at this year’s BlogHer conference in Chicago (here are some Twittered notes on it).  Liza is giving Chaiken a piece of her mind, but the question is: what piece is it? You tell us.

Our gals from Hydrangeas Are Pretty, Shelli and Narda, got official in Connecticut, with mega-adorable Noah Matan getting a ringside seat. Malka is reclining on the step behind them. You know, with slight changes in the scenery, this is pretty much exactly like what unfolded for my beloved and me on the other side of the country (geographically and politically speaking) last July. Little boy child in arms, girl child blazé on the steps behind.  

Much love and hearty congratulations to an old couple knee-deep in kids. 

New additions and updates await posting here at LesbianFamily, and they’ll be forthcoming soon.  Thanks for stopping by.

Samantha O’Connell, Angie Matt, and their son Henry O’Connell, at the rally in San Francisco following the California Supreme Court’s upholding of Prop 8.  Clearly, no one can vote or rule our love away.  State by state, coast to coast, that’s what’s going to keep us going.

Lesbian mothers, lesbians with mothers, mothers with lesbians, family with lesbians or mothers in ‘em, past, current, future, and hoped-for: love to you all.

[Photo by Christopher Gannon, AP, in The Columbia Missourian.]

Above: Dawn BarbouRoske, second from left, of Iowa City leans towards her partner, Jen BarbouRoske, after learning of the Iowa Supreme Court ruling Friday in favor of legalizing gay marriage. Between them is their daughter Bre, 6. Their other daughter, 11-year-old McKinley, left, reacts to the ruling.

We extend our hearty congratulations to lesbian families in Iowa, who as of yesterday began to be able to receive the myriad legal protections afforded by state-recognized partnership.

In LesbianFamily.org news, we have two new additions and a transition:

• Geek and Lawyer, who live and write in Australia, joins the TTC listings, 
• adventures in making a baby has joined the Expecting listings, and
• Creating a Miracle moved from TTC to Expecting

Welcome, yay, and congratulations!

Two more blogs are on deck (also an addition and a transition), and as soon as we can find out what the URLs are, we’ll announce them here.  This makes for as good a time as any to remind you to include your URL in a comment when you’re letting us know you want to be listed or shifted.  :)

Over the past several weeks, a wonderful handful of folks have written in and offered to help tend the LesFam field here.  Next week I hope to run a welcome post, and will invite the new folks to introduce themselves (and the returning old folks to re-introduce and update us). ‘Til then, we raise a sippy cup to you, Iowa!