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!

family,  from the Flickr photostream of Sacha Digi

No new postings requests this week! First such quiet week in a while.

Meanwhile, we’re still stumping for co-conspiritors here at LesbianFamily.org (see Liza’s post in late March), and we’re still planning on having a Lesbian Family Blogger Meet Up in Chicago in late-July, the Sunday morning following the BlogHer conference (see my post as of late March, here).

Warmest wishes that spring is springing where you are. If you are a practicing Judeo-Christian (either or both!), may the upcoming holidays of Easter and of Passover renew your faith.

yeah, this is good.  from ohchicken.

Of course if you look a few pictures further in ohchicken’s photostream, you’ll see that the spaghetti’s appeal was time-limited. Go check it out. She writes about her family and her life at  we are fambly. where you’ll find more Jude! Jude! Jude! with and without spaghetti.

Now to the new  or updated listings news: LOVE IS LOVE has both moved to a new blog, and become a combined project of both gals, Bebebaba and Bebemama.  Perhaps an even more thrilling move was from TTC to Expecting.

Shrike & Whozat went from Expecting to Babies!  About five months ago in real life, and just recently at LesbianFamily.org. Congrats, and happy recent five month birthday to Peeper!  Yowza what a doozy of a month she just had.  And her mamas.  

Mother Issues, has recently listed in Foster and Interracial Families. Welcome to Lee and Thorn, who describe themselves as “at the very beginning of our journey to become mothers via special needs adoption.”

New to the TTC listings is metal stork , written by two nomadic gals who will “continue their nomadic ways forever and are looking forward to a gypsy baby to make their travels that much more interesting.”

And Robin, blogging at Here’s What I Don’t Get, just proposed we start up a page for separated/co-parenting blogs.  Good point.  We’ll put that in the LesFam editorial group hopper, and meanwhile — while we wait for a revised or new page for her blog — at least we’ll get started with a nod here.  When you’re there visiting her, congratulate her on polishing off an entire month of a post every day, as part of National Blog Posting Month. Wheew!

Ah! And one more thing!  I just wandered around a bit, as one tends to do online, and from Shrike & Whozat checked in on Vee and Jay and what should I discover but that they went and  had their baby!  So! First, many enthusiastic congratulations to them, and second, they can now be found NOT in TTC, where they were, or Expecting, where they could well have been for the previous 9 months, but Babies!

First off, what’s BlogHer? BlogHer is an online community of and for women who blog, and BlogHer, as a thing you might “go to,” is their bodacious annual conference.

From their About page,

 BlogHer’s mission is to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment. Today BlogHer provides the number-one community for and guide to blogs by women, reaching more than 14 million women each month via annual conferences, a Web hub (http://www.blogher.com), and an publishing network of more than 2,700 qualified, contextually targeted blog affiliates (http://blogherads.com).

BlogHer puts on regional conferences as well as a big national one, meant to enable women online to connect to one another, share expertise, ideas, network, and basically whoop it up a lot.

I went  last year in San Francisco, and I know LesbianFamily.org founder Liza spoke at the 2007 conference in Chicago and attended last year’s regional conference in Atlanta.  As Liza and others can attest, they are doing really impressive coalition-building across difference, and have made consistent overtures to search out and provide platforms for lesbian, lesbian mom, and women of color bloggers (lesbian/mom or otherwise).  They are good people.

So this year BlogHer’s national conference will be back in Chicago (sold out already, apparently; here’s the waitlist), and at least two of us from the LesbianFamily.org group (Liza and I) will be there.  Will you be there? Want to meet up over brunch after the conference? Yay!  

I only have Yelp! to go by, but the West Egg Cafe looks good, and is just a few blocks north of the hotel where the conference is taking place. I figure folks with neighborhood know-how can weigh in, and we can chit-chat in the comments here to fine-tune plans.

UPDATE: WE’RE GONNA MEET AT THE WEST EGG CAFE @ 9AM SUNDAY MORNING, GALS!

And even if you’re not going but want to help spread the word to folks who might, would you consider pasting the above button in your sidebar or in a post?  [FYI: It's 150px wide & 200 px tall.]

<a title=”lesfammeetupblogher09″ href=”http://lesbianfamily.org/2009/03/24/going-to-blogher-lets-meet-up/”> <img src=”http://lesbianfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/lesfammeetupblogher09.jpg” alt=”lesfammeetupblogher09″ width=”150″height=”200″/></a>

[Note: if the link gets wonky on you, you might have to fix the infernal "curly" quotation marks in the HTML, typing in your own "  " marks instead. I've tried to fix them here in the post & am stumped. Apologies.]

This photo, entitled “beach,” is from kristyanddonna87’s Flickr photo stream. It’s from their wedding, and there are a bunch of wonderful other pictures there. Go take a peek, and wish them well.

• L’Dor Va Dor- From Generation to Generation  Recently added!

Go give Melissa and Terry a visit, and tell them LesFam sent you! We’ve recently finished some upgrades to LesbianFamily.org, thanks to the handy work of Kemi at Poles Apart Design.  About which: want a WordPress blog? Have one and need a tune-up? Kemi’s your gal!  I mean, how can you beat that graphic (at right)?  The recent tune-up to current WordPress template standards has enabled us to edit pages in something other than raw HTML, which means: ALL THE PAGES ARE NOW ALPHABETIZED! Hosanna! 

Now that it’s so easy to find specific blogs, you might take another stroll through the listings, just to see what’s there. We’re talking hundreds of blogs, people, hundreds of them.  Nearly a hundred of them TTC and another near ‘hundred writing about their fresh Babies! alone. Both are topics folks have a ton of questions and answers about, not to mention so many of the others.  Basically if you are or are raising anybody specified by one of these listing pages, you’re bound to find kinship, solace and insight as soon as you start meandering around the blogs listed.

Frankly, doing this clean-up, where I’ve had the chance to cut and paste basically every single blog title in the LesFam listings, I’ve gotten even more warm and runny about all of this.  Each title (many of which I couldn’t resist peeking into and checking up on) represents somebody caring deeply about family and family-making. Some lesbian caring deeply about family, and caring about doing it right.  With love, and thoughtfulness (elsewise: why blog? since blogging basically forces examination, which usually forces thoughtfulness).  The titles alone are so telling, so full of humor, whimsy, hope.  Man, I love you guys!

Now! Please let us know if you want your blog moved from one page to another, to reflect a shift in the status of your family, and also please remember that we’ve added two new pages — Families of Color & Single Parenting – so if you or someone you know of ought to be cross-listed there, let us know with a comment on the appropriate page!

The upgrade has also enabled us to add a few new features, the first of which we’ll demo soon as I can figure out how to use it: a poll feature!  (Next week’s new feature? Well you’ll have to come back and see!) A site like this functions as a big tent for the wide-ranging community that makes up the “all kinds of lesbian families” who list their blogs here.  It’s also fairly content-lite, and user-generated.  So a weekly poll (or semi-weekly, depending on how long we need to keep them open to get an interesting response) seems like just the right way to take the pulse of the wide range of lesbian family (or lesbian family -friendly) visitors to this site.  We’ll try and do one every week, and will archive them for ongoing reference.  Leave us a comment and let us know what you’d like to hear more about from your fellow LesFam readers!