P’ito tells the New York State Senate what he thinks

This was the first time I have been at Pride with my kid, and it was so different. Different from going as a non-parent, different from my expectations…

When we were TTC and then waiting for P’ito to come home, I watched the families with kids with pride and a hefty side dish of envy. I wanted what they had and I wanted it NOW. I had this vision of us all walking along, holding hands as a family, with the local lgbt families group… and instead it felt a little bit like herding cats.   At the same time, I was free to browse in the information tents, snag all the swag I wanted, chat with friends, yell raunchy comments at the ladies, watch all the groups go by and cheer…

My parents were there with us – which was awesome – I have the most supportive family ever – but I was hot and cranky because P’ito was sleepy and cranky and because I kept feeling like I was losing people along the way. Tons of half-finished conversations because where did they go? Are we losing the group and falling in with the loud bar group behind us?

But when I finally pulled him out of the stroller and sat him on my shoulders, it was perfect. He waved and smiled and held his sign, and I managed to relax a bit and enjoy myself.  I like our small(er) city pride – a managable parade without hours of smiling politicians and liquor floats – but lots of people both gay and straight out on the streets cheering us on.  Add in a beautiful sunny day, and you’re there.

So:

What does Pride mean to you?  What are your personal Pride traditions and memories?  Do you dream of marching with your kid someday?

And how do you explain all the fabulousness of drag queens and leathermen and PTA presidents to your kids, if you’ve got kids old enough to say “’cause why, mama?” I didn’t have to do much explaining this year, but I’m puzzling over how to explain to P’ito what exactly it is that we’re celebrating.  How do you explain Pride to a preschooler without getting too deep into the ugliness of homophobia?

And don’t forget to add your family pride photos to the LesbianFamily.org flickr group…

On a totally different note – please welcome to the ranks of LF.org:

TTC:

Figboiler

Non-Bio:

Butchmama

Young Kids:

Lavender Tales

[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!

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!

One new listing to announce: to the bodacious Trying listing, please welcome

• 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!

This picture, “Top of the Rock. Date Night!” was submitted by longtime LesbianFamily.org lister gal Shelli, who writes about her beautiful NYC family at Hydrangeas are Pretty. A new baby brother has just joined the family, and big sister Malka is “smitten”! Go on over and give ‘em all congratulations.

If you photograph your family and would like to share those images (to the whole entire world wide web!), consider joining up with the LesbianFamily.org Flickr group! Photos set to “public” and with the “blog this” option enabled are among those we can post here. We’d love to plug your blog, and share a picture of your family!

In New Listings news, Trying again, Story of a Lesbian Family in the Making now titled Serendipitously yours  has been added to the TTC list. Welcome!

And thanks for checking in.

And by “web,” I don’t mean the world wide kind. More like the spider kind. This second batch of phenomenally late updates has only been in the queue since mid -October! Only four and a half months! The other ones, well. Picture the inside of Miss Haversham’s house, from Great Expectations. That’s what the LesbianFamily.org comments mediation queue looked like. Dust over everything, spider webs everywhere, plates of unfinished food, totally crumbly and mouldy, the clock frozen in time, somewhere about early summer last year, when everything began to get just a little bit hairy. But all’s better now, eh what? Or at least, we’ve taken a shop-vac to the inside of the place.

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!

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:

• Married and Ready to Make Babies
• Two Moms To Be…
• 2 Girls 2 Dogs 2 Cats…
• eeney meeney miney mommy
• ISO: Baby

We also have a crop of Expecting blogs:

• Luca Has 2 Mommies
• in the wilderness
• existere (latin): to stand out, to emerge.
• BabyBoom 2 Futuras Mamis Lesbianas.

Several new Babies! blogs:

• Luca Has 2 Mommies
• Mommy J’s Wild Ride

And Kids, both Little and Big:

• Emerging Butterfly
• A mom’s struggle with identity
• Luca Has 2 Mommies
• Come What May
• A mom’s struggle with identity

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

Familia Lesbiana

• BabyBoom 2 Futuras Mamis Lesbianas.

Families of Color

• Seriously Involved

Foster

• Sweetest of Things
• Wishinghopingpraying’s weblog

Interracial Families

• Come What May

Multiples

• Come What May

And Single Parenting

• Sweetest of Things

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.