I recently had the opportunity to visit Polly in her native habitat!

I have also been seen in public, although this is not technically my native habitat:

It is perfectly true that neither of these pictures prove that we are the writers failing to update this blog, nor that we are lesbians. But there are some outside sources of information that at least suggest we are telling the truth.

For example, Polly spoke at Mom 2.0 in April. And she works at BlogHer! (And if you’ve been following the fake-lesbian-bloggers story, you know that BlogHer Liz Henry was one of the people responsible for uncovering the hoax of “Amina.” BlogHers are tough to fool.)

My existence can be corroborated, too. I was live-blogged at BlogHerFood ’11, in May. I’ve even been photographed in public by people I don’t know! (I’m partially obscured by the trash can, but my face is visible.) In real life, especially when first meeting me, people often doubt that I’m a lesbian. In fact, sometimes they run away from that “straight woman” who can’t possibly be talking to them. (Vikki is also real! And not a married heterosexual man!) I don’t take it personally — my wife reacted the same way when we first met. Unlike my wife, you, dear reader, are going to have to take my word for it that I’m really not straight.

I can’t verify the existence of all of the bloggers in this directory — not by a long shot. But your erstwhile authors? Really real people. Really women. Really lesbians. With real lesbian families.

Children’s Fiction About or Including Lesbian or Gay Families

• Mommy, Mama & Me (board book)
• Daddy, Papa & Me (board book)
• Uncle Bobby’s Wedding
• Heather Has Two Mommies
• The Family Book (and many, many other Todd Parr titles!)
• Emma and Meesha My Boy
• The Different Dragon

Children’s Non-Fiction about Lesbian or Gay Families

• And Baby Makes 4
• And Tango Makes Three (storybook with true story)

“Young Adult” (Teen) Fiction with Lesbian Parents

• Between Mom and Jo
• Donorboy
• From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun
• Jack
• Luv Ya Bunches (tween)
• Violet in Bloom (tween)

True Stories by People with Lesbian or Gay Parents (Teen/Adult)

• Let’s Get This Straight: The Ultimate Handbook for Youth with LGBTQ Parents
• What About the Children?
• How It Feels to Have a Gay or Lesbian Parent
• Families Like Mine
• Love Makes a Family (photo portraits of gay and lesbian families)
• Women in Love: Portraits of Lesbian Mothers and Their Families (photo book)

Books About and For Lesbian Parents

• Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-Biological Lesbian Moms Tell All
• She Looks Just Like You: A Memoir of (Non-Biological Lesbian) Motherhood
• And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families
• Waiting for the Call: From Preacher’s Daughter to Lesbian Mom
• Buying Dad: One Woman’s Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor

Books About Pregnant Lesbians

• My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy (humorous memoir)
• The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians

More Interesting LGBTQ Bibliographies

• 2011 ALA Rainbow Project List (4th Annual)
• Mombian’s Comments on the 2011 ALA Rainbow Project List
• I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the hell do I read?
• Lambda Literary – YA Book Reviews
• Queer YA – Book Reviews of fiction for LGBTQ teens
• For Youth Services or School Librarians – Serving LGBTQ Teens: A How-to-Do-It Manual for Librarians
• 2010 ALA Rainbow List
• 2009 ALA Rainbow List
• 2008 ALA Rainbow List

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.

…

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!

…

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.

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.

For most of the LGBT community, this is not exactly a news flash. In fact, it comes close to the “studies say drunk driving causes motor vehicle accidents” or “studies say losing weight requires exercising more and eating less” school of research.

Even so, mainstream media validation of our experiences is nice.

And it doesn’t get much more official or mainstream than the New York Times. And on Friday, the NYT Money folks wrote a thoroughly researched article concluding that for middle/upper-middle class families with 2 children, the out of pocket costs of being a lesbian family (yes, they used lesbians as their example!) is between $41k-$467k greater than those of a similarly situated married heterosexual family.

That’s right. An lesbian couple who are exceptionally financially unlucky could spend almost half a million dollars more, between ages 35-85, than a similarly situated heterosexual couple.

Details on the assumptions used by the reporters, and how those variables might change, are also provided by the NYT Money reporters.

Many of us have reported less exhaustive, more back-of-the-napkin estimates on the costs too. I wrote one about the cost of fertility treatment, and another on the tax impact being a lesbian family had on me in 2006.

Now, it is true that every dollar in that $41-467k would not instantly disappear if same sex marriage were recognized by every state and the federal government. The fertility treatment costs are independent of marriage. But legal recognition of our marriages would make a HUGE difference towards equalizing our financial footing.

Incidentally, I’m not anti-tax. I want to be clear about that. I think paying our fair share of taxes is a critical aspect of living in a democracy. I want to pay my fair share towards schools and roads and public safety and elections and national security and research and health care and the myriad of other services the government does and should provide.

The key word here is fair. Similarly situated families should pay similar taxes. My family shouldn’t have to pay almost half a million dollars more in lifetime taxes than, for example, my sister’s family.

What do you think of the idea of a monthly LesbianFamily.org email newsletter? We wouldn’t want to spam you, but we’re also looking at ways we might be able to generate more community within our community.

A newsletter would give us another way to highlight newly listed blogs, show off bloggers and photos we love, list activities of interest, and offer the possibility for things like classified ads or essays/posts/poetry from those of you with something to say who aren’t able to make the committment to be full blown contributing editors or authors.

Is there anything else you’d want to see in a newsletter? Or really NOT want to see?

If we do a newsletter, what we would probably do is spam all of you whose email addresses we have ONCE, with a clear opt-in for future newsletters. Unless you have another idea for how we might reach you. We’re open to ideas!

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.

[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!

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.]

The remaining installment of the updateage brings us all — stagger stagger, pant pant pant — up to the minute with all the lesbian family bloggery! Over fifty new listings in all, with a handful of old ones moving from one page to another.

To celebrate, I’ve added a link in the sidebar (no there — down a little further… yep!) speeding you all to the LesbianFamily.org swag repository at Café Press, which has been there for EONS, since Liza set it up. I’m hoping that perhaps with a handy-dandy sidebar link, these fine products will now have the attention they deserve, and will soon be winging their way into lesbian baby showers world-wide. Since it’s me doing this promo, I’m using the trucker hat to demo the logo in action. But yes, ladies, there are baby-doll tees. And tote bags, and onsies, and the works. Expect more such shameless promos around major holidays in the future.

Also in the future, we’re hoping to spruce the under-the-hood part of the site up a bit more with an updated WordPress template, which will greatly facilitate a few long-awaited upkeep projects, such as the alphabetizing of the listings (altogether too onerous in the pure HTML environment currently available to our admin panel). We’ll also settle back into regular postings from the wonderful LesbianFamily.org Flickr album. Please write with suggestions of things you’d like to see here, in the way of new listings categories, or other resource features. And likewise, let us know if you want your blog to be shuffled from one page to the next.

A heart-felt thanks to all of you who’ve waited so long to see your blogs listed here. Thank you for writing about your family and family-making journeys. You all, together, help to make our community that much bigger and richer. And the better the community, the better things are for our kids (or kid-conjuring).

Most recently listed in TTC, allow me to please introduce:

• baby toes
• Bang head here…
• A Tale of 2 Future Mommies
• Baby Mamas
• Two Moms with a Plan
• Our Journey to Motherhood
• Girls Seeking Gabber
• The Sock Drawer
• Dear Baby….Love Mama
• …two wives and a boarder marker…
• A Story of Two Moms
• Growing up Clangley
• love is love
• Two girls in love….

Most recently listed in Expecting, please mosey on by:

• Mommy and Mamita
• Two Girls Trying For A Baby
• An Offering of Love
• Craving of Motherhood
• An Accident of Hope
• Two Girls Trying For A Baby
• First Time Second Time
• Mesdames plus baby
• For the Long Haul
• 1 In Vermillion
• Darwin has 2 Mommies

We have us some fresh Babies, check ‘em out here:

• Enough Grows
• The Commune Child
• May the Beauty…
• Irreverent Mother
• Journey To Om

A few Little Kids blogs have also joined the LesFam fray:

• First Time Second Time
• Peaches & Coconuts

One of the above blogs is cross-listed under Non-bio:

• First Time Second Time

And several of the newly listed blogs are cross-listed under Single Parenting, a recently established page, along with Families of Color which I hope we’ll see a lot more blogs get listed on.

• The Sock Drawer
• Ocean Dreamer
• For the Long Haul

Okay, now! Of you go, to pay these gals a visit!