Also, since no one called out “No, no, a thousand times no! Don’t alphabetize the listings!” I’m going to just slowly alphabetize them. And I’ll notate the freshest batch of listings on any given page with a Recently added! jobbie. Since that was the benefit of the non-alphabetized list: E-Z access to recent additions.

Speaking of which! New to LesbianFamily listings this past week are:

• Specific Destiny just started their conception journey, and has joined the prodigious LesFam TTC ranks.
• And Ramblings of the Other Mother writes about raising her and her partner’s Big Kid, as they all anticipate the any-day-now celebrate the birth of their new baby. You can also find Ramblings in Expecting (but not for long!), and Non-Bio.

Welcome to you both! And readers, do drop in, and tell ‘em LesFam sent you. Changes in status this past week:

• The Chronicles of Conception is now chronicling gestation! So they can be found in Expecting, rather than TTC.
• And moving right along, Possible Maybe is now talkin’ Babies!, and so will no longer be found amongst those Expecting.

Congrats all around!

…consequently, your Monday changelog is on hold coming up soon. Several blogs joined the fold before the comments feature on LesbianFamily went dark (or A.W.O.L., or on an unscheduled break, or on a walkabout, wherever they are). Unfortunately, it was their chronological order in the “Moderated comments” queue that helped us identify them. And now they’re all off wherever the comments feature is. Hopefully behaving themselves. recovered.

Sorry for the extended inconvenience! We hope to begin to be able to hear from you again look forward to hearing from you soon now.

But meanwhile: your comments aren’t being received, and haven’t been since sometime earlier this week. We definitely hope that your old comments didn’t get lost behind the bleachers at the football game or wherever our comments feature got itself to.

If you’d like to have your blog listed, we’re hoping you can just hang on a bit and try again soon, when this episode will all be in our pasts.

Thankyouverymuch.

We have some more blogs to draw your attention to from the Egregious Oversight File, followed by a nice smattering of recent requests for listings.

From the Egregious Oversight File, allow me to introduce you to:

• Barb’s ROYAL website. Barb asked to be listed under Little Kids back in, oh, NOVEMBER of last year. Oops.
• Then we have PBX makes four, who are TTC, and made the request back in NOVEMBER too. By the looks of things we’ve still caught them whilst they’re TTC. Though our dearest wishes for them are that they find themselves Expecting soon enough. It’s a journey.
• Another NOVEMBER orphan (see the trend? we all went to heck in a handbasket right around the winter holidays! surprised? didn’t think so!) is Scribble and Scribe, who had asked to be listed under the Big Kids section of LesbianFamily, in addition to the Grown Kids section, where she’d been listed that month.
• Finally, this week’s Longest Wait on the Bench award goes to Suburban Dyke, who asked in JANUARY of last year to be cross-listed in both Little Kids and Non-Bio pages. We initially got her listed on Little Kids, but just now added her to the Non-Bio crowd. Welcome!

That does it for the Egregious Oversight File, or the EOF for the AO (Acronym Oriented). One day we will empty that dadgum EOF for good! Hope springs inernal!

And now, here are updates and requests for listings from this past week:

• 1 in Vermillion has joined the TTC list, as has Two Hot Mamas and Eat, Poop, Love. Welcome to LesbianFamily.org, and abundant fertility to you all!
• The Commune Child has transitioned from TTC to Expecting. Mazel tov!
• Probably Boring Ramblings moved from TTC to Expecting to Babies! Not all in the space of one week. You know, over time. But this last week she updated us as to her new status. Congrats!
• Finally, wake up naked has joined both the Babies! and Non-Bio pages.

A rousing LesFam welcome to all the new folks. Happy trails — and minimal trials! — to everyone.

Anyone wishing to add their blog to the listings should just leave a comment on the page they’d like to be listed on. Enough folks ask that, as they leave a comment, that I’ve not only mentioned that here, but added a note to that effect at the top of each blog listing page. Hope that helps clarify. (Also, I’ve added a modest little “list last updated” notation at the bottom of each list, so that folks know how fresh it is.)

I’m tempted to add another LesbianFamily.org Spring Cleaning To Do list item (under “clear out sad sacks from the EFO”): alphabetize the various page listings. That is, unless a mountain of folks write in to say “No! No! A thousand times no!”

Some lists, most notably the Trying To Conceive list, are just so huge that it’s hard to find a given blog. It’s convenient to see who’s been added recently, and at the moment one can just peep the bottom of the list to find out. But the same thing might be accomplished if we add a bold, red “Recently added!” notation to the blogs posted in any given month. Goddess knows I don’t want to add to the administrative overhead (eek!). But I think the pages should be easy to browse, too, for new folks.

What do you think? Any other relatively modest improvements you’d like to see?

I’m in need of biology/anatomy books for an adopted 5 year old girl. ‘Where do babies come from?’ is coming up, and we need a book that shows a little more breadth than ‘when a man and woman love each other’.

Now I know you all are chock-full of bright ideas and rich resources, so I’m mostly figuring you’ll write in and give a sister some help in the comments stream.

I myself only know of a few resources, and can’t vouch for their quality. There’s AdoptionBooks.com, which is an “authorized affiliate” of Amazon.com. The site selects and reviews “the best in Adoption literature,” and has a Children’s Books section. Don’t know how queer-friendly or even queer-conginzant they are.

Then there’s the excellent site/blog, worth the trip, written by a librarian and focussing on “queer books for kids and teens.” I don’t know whether she’s reviewed any good books lately that answer the “Where do babies come from?” question, but I would imagine she’d be amenable to questions.

Of course the first place I looked was Mombian, since I thought Dana reviewed a book within the past year or so that was a good one on the topic. Alas, I couldn’t dig it up, and of course I also might be mis-remembering where I read about it. Doubly frustrating, since I am for sure not remembering the book’s title.

LesFam Readership, to the rescue!

First, from the blogs who collected mounds of dust in the Egregious Oversight File, allow me introduce you to:

• Grunt ‘n’ Squeak, which wins the top Egregious Oversight prize for languishing in obscurity since NOVEMBER. Of LAST YEAR. They’re listed in Babies! and Multiples.
• 2moms2babies only languished since DECEMBER. They’re listed in Babies! and Multiples as well.
• Finally we have chasing the tree, which has only languished since JANUARY. That was just yesterday, it seems! O how time flies. They’re listed in Babies!

I’m not quite sure I can guarantee that we’ve managed to list their blogs while their babies are still babies, but there they are.

Early April requests for listings are:

• chasing the tree, listed in both Big Kids and Multiples.
• The Reluctant Blogger listed in both Big Kids and Non-bio.

Lucky for us, these are Big Kids blogs, so I feel confident that their big kids are still big. Probably — this is just a guess here — they’re even bigger now than they were last week, when the requests rolled in.

Please extend all these gals and their young a spirited LesFam welcome, and pay a visit to them and their online lives. Meanwhile, I will extend a sheepish LesFam apology to the Egregious Oversight File residents for their long wait on the bench.

If any of you made a long ago request that is still unfulfilled, please leave a note on this post and I’ll see to it that your blog is rescued from the LesFam Egregious Oversight File. Likewise, if any of you would like to see your blog shifted — i.e., from TTC to Expecting, Expecting to Babies!, Babies! to Little Kids, or Little Kids to Big Kids — do tell. Until we get a raft of intern elves (who aren’t distracted by their own kids!), we’ll continue to rely on you, Gentle Reader, to help us keep the LesbianFamily.org site kempt.

Many thanks.

Good morning, Irene! What better goddess to invoke at this time, just on the heels of the five year annivesary of the Iraq war and the U.S. casualty count tipping over the 4,000 mark.

With spring comes news of more lesbians invoking or bearing the happy results of fertility. May our families contribute to more peace in the world. Here are this week’s additions to or shufflings of LesbianFamily blogs:

• Shrike & Whozat have (tentatively) moved from TTC to Expecting, as has the Sarahbean half of the Joulybean’s baby blog team (the Joulybean half is still TTC). Huzzah, and good health to you gals. Or, to quote S&W, “Squeeeee!”
• Creating a Miracle has joined the TTC crowd, having recently begun their IVF journey.

A rousing LesbianFamily welcome to the two new blogs, and a congrats to Joulybean and Sarahbean!

New blogs listed on the Trying page are:

• Joulybean’s baby blog
• Our TTC Blog
• puffer and the baby fish
• Word to Your Mother(s)
• Insert Metaphor
• And Baby Makes 8

Star in My Heart is a newly listed blog by a non-bio mom, listed on the Non-Bio page, though they’re also TTC right now.

PBX makes four has moved from TTC to Expecting (congrats!), joining new listing A Tale of Two Mamas, which is also cross-listed at Interracial Families.

Nhamo in Paradise has moved from Expecting to Babies!, joining new listings The Frankenbaby Chronicles and Together is a Wonderful Place to Be! Mazel tov to you all.

Finally, All For The Love Of You has joined both the Little Kids and Big Kids listings.

A hearty LesbianFamily welcome to everyone who’s newly listing their blog here! If you haven’t already met these gals, mosey on over and set a spell.

Like me, many of you current and future parents perusing yesterday’s New York Times will have sucked up the article “Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK)” with a mixture of fascination and dread. Laura M. Holson, the article’s author, writes that

Children increasingly rely on personal technological devices like cellphones to define themselves and create social circles apart from their families, changing the way they communicate with their parents.

Holson introduces us to a smattering of parent-kid combos and the ways in which their communication is either foiled or facilitated or both, thanks to the use of cellphones and text messaging. Phone company analyst types share their studies about how many kids will be using cellphones in the near future: 81% of Americans between the ages of 5 and 24.

We are also reminded that every new device we bring into our lives is a Trojan Horse of sorts. Or, if mixing metaphors is an irresistible pastime of yours, as it is mine, let’s say a Trojan Pandora’s Box. In this little device rolls, nestling itself innocently into pockets and purses, atop chests of drawers and desks and dining tables. Then once it’s well established, out pops the realization that it has changed how we communicate, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the less so. For me, the most unsettling images in the article were those of kids lost in device-mediated conversations to others in the midst of what I would have thought would have been sacrosanct family togetherness times, like eating meals.

I’m sure I go around believing in the concept of sacrosanct family togetherness time (or FTT) because of how young our kids are right now. (You down with FTT? Yeah, you know me!) See, we’re in that rare period in which our kids meet a vast majority of their emotional and social needs inside the immediate family. It’s exhausting, but it’s an amazing thing at the same time. Very little presses into their consciousnesses from the exterior of this tightly governed space — at the moment. These days, when the lil’ monkey talks about her friends at preschool, I know that the friendship she speaks of is a touch more imaginary than real. She describes the Big Dog at school — the one I like to call Canis Major (not her real name) — as her best friend there, but I’m not at all sure Canis would be able to pick our girlie out of a line-up.

If you set aside the five cousins that people her peer group, her little chum across the street (she of Mama and Baba fame) is her primary real-life buddy. They play with each other every week, and monthly they both schmooze with the offspring of the other gals we all met and stayed tight with from our lesbian childbirth education class. But 100% of these interactions are engineered by us right now. There’ll come a time when our kids will not only initiate time with their chums, but they’ll prefer it to time with us. One by one, confidences and issues will be shared and resolved with people other than us. And I’m sure some of that will take place via some handheld device or another. Or at least some measure of the relationship and trust with those people will be developed that-a-way.

I’m a firm believer that any tool — rudimentary or electronic — is as beneficial or as destructive as the person using it. Plus, it’s hard to be a dedicated Luddite when I know that some of the most gratifying written communication I’ve been a part of (this blog) takes place using a tool that’s only about a generation old (the personal computer), which transmits words and images via a route that’s been in widespread use for little more than ten years (the internet), and a medium on that internet that’s even younger (blogs). So rather than cry over spilt lemons, I’d rather make lemonade. And swill that lemonade whilst doing as the Romans do, now that we find ourselves vacationing in Rome for an indefinite period of time. Vets with kids knee-deep in their teen years know all this only too well. Lori Hahn got up the pluck to start her own MySpace account in order to wheedle her way into their kids’ techno-mediated brains.

Who knew I would be foreshadowing last Friday when I mentioned how I needed netlingo to decipher the secret acronym language of the texterati? And yet behold what Holson says:

Text messaging, in particular, has perhaps become this generation’s version of pig Latin… Some acronyms meant to alert children to prying eyes are POS (“parent over shoulder”), PRW (“parents are watching”) and KPC (“keeping parents clueless”).

Still stinging from the truth of it all, yet thinking wistfully of Roman lemonade, I thought it might help to anticipate some of the acronyms that my own moppets might find themselves thumbing into some device (as soon as they learn how to distinguish the letters on said device). Some are simple extensions of the above acronyms, some are customized to suit the unique cultural environment of the “lesfam,” as I like to call it, merrily jumping on the netlinguistic bandwagon (or the lesbian family, for the shortcut-averse).

• MLPOS (”mannish lesbian parent over shoulder”)
• SSPRW (”same-sex parents are watching”)
• K2MC (”keeping two moms clueless”)
• RVDLW (”rendez-vous during ‘The L-Word’”)
• CM-BBAAFTT (”can’t meet — Baba being anal about Family Togetherness Time”)
• DSGTOTV-MSPHWC! (”Dinah Shore golf tourney on TV — mall shopping spree here we come!”

As with so much of the future, the possibilities are endless.

No, it wasn’t in the gift department.  Sassafras loved all her gifts.  And I don’t even consider the fact that she ate only jelly for breakfast, only gummy lifesavers for lunch, and had a less than 40 minute nap as messing up. Heck, even SuperParent has to concede to the rigors of the day.

No, I messed up in the last 2 hours of the day.

We took our sugar-fueled, nap-deprived toddler over to our good friends’ house for Christmas Dinner and Movie watching that evening.  My child was running on determination and inertia alone.  I figured that the magical sleepiness of turkey would overcome those forbidding obstacles and lull my child into dreamland for me.  As we tromped down the stairs to watch the final installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, I wasn’t worried about the inappropriateness of the show: the violence, the scariness.  No, I figured, as soon as we curled up in the giant beanbag she’d be out for the count. 

Oh how I misjudged the strength of her determination.  She didn’t fall asleep, and as I tried to coax her into dreamland, while selfishly watching the movie, I realized how badly I messed up when she looked up at a battle scene and began narrating, “he’s dead, and he’s dead, and he’s dead, and he’s dead.”  All four of us adults present began talking about how it was all pretend, and how silly it was really, as my 2 year old stared at the screen in captive horror, pointing at the “scary octopus” (Davy Jones) and talking about how the pirates were going to bite her foot.

We packed up and left, movie unfinished.

I read her stories that night and we talked about lots of different things trying to get the movie out of her head.  But still, at 3 am, Klove and I were woken by her screams of terror.  When I went into her room, flipped on her lights, she was huddled in her bed.  As I knelt by her she looked at me and said, “there’s too many babies, mom.  Too many babies.”  Tears streaming down her face.  I would never have thought that a well-loved and cherished 2 year old could know hopelessness and despair, but it was there in her voice and my heart broke because I had let this happen to her. 

The “too many babies” comes from her favorite movie, Shrek the Third, but she’s never been even a little bit afraid of the Shrek movies.  The scene where Shrek has the nightmare about babies is usually her favorite scene.  She shrieks “too many babies!” with glee as the babies pour through the window.  But in thinking about it, and the scenes she saw of pirates and monsters overwhelming ships and people in the first half hour or so of the Pirates movie, I can see the similarities and see how her dreaming mind could combine the two.  She didn’t ask to watch Shrek once yesterday.

I’d say that the next morning everything was fine, but she still talks about the Octopus she saw on our friend’s T.V. and she still talks of Pirates biting her foot.  With as imaginative as my daughter is, and as long a memory as she has, I think it’ll be quite a while before the threat of pirates and octopi fades.  And there’s nothing I can do about it, but reassure her of our love and the imaginariness of the monsters.

***

Too often, in our fight for equality and respect, we gild our parenting skills; we laud our wisdom and foresight in how we planned and researched and raised our children.  But we’re only human.  We mess up.  This does not make us less worthy parents.  True equality will be manifest when we can ‘fess up about our mistakes – the times when selfishness, laziness, ignorance, impotence, frustration, impatience trip us up.  I don’t know about you, but when I mess up, I feel paralyzed inside.  Too busy battling the internalized homophobia that says I’m inherently unworthy to parent a child (and that this mistake is a sign of that unworthiness) to really live in the present for a while.  My mistakes eat at me and wear me down.

So this is my confession, and my resolution: I am not a perfect parent, and I do not have to be.

Join me.  When have you messed up, and how?