LesbianFamily.org

Ch-Ch-Changes

Art-Sweet — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:03:36 +0000

I have been on a tidying binge around here, starting with the more time-sensitive TTC category. Also deleted a bunch of blogs that for whatever reason, no longer existed, or hadn’t been updated since 2007. I hope wherever you are, my friends, it’s a good place.

Moving from TTC - Expecting:

Moving from TTC - Babies (sorry about that, ladies & congrats! ETA: Sorry that we, um completely missed your entire pregnancy, not sorry that you have a baby now)

Moved from Expecting to Babies (Hooray!)

Pride

Art-Sweet — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:34:49 +0000

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

“I now pronounce you spouses for life. You may kiss.”

Polly — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:27:47 +0000

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.

Family love

Polly — Thu, 28 May 2009 08:46:52 +0000

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.

Happy Day to You

Polly — Sun, 10 May 2009 17:45:32 +0000

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.

Congratulations, Iowans!

Polly — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 05:58:10 +0000

[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

Polly — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 06:41:14 +0000

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.”

Polly — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:28:35 +0000

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!

Going to BlogHer? Let’s meet up!

Polly — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:58:18 +0000

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.

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.]

[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.]

News from Latin America and a Bienvenida

Clare — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 03:41:53 +0000

I have been updating the Spanish blogs– I would like to welcome A. Daniela, a Chilean couple in search of their first child and to create community in Chile for lesbian mothers.

Also, if you want LGBT news (in English) of the happenings in Latin America check out Julieta’s new blog: Get your Queer OUT in Latin America.

Please, if you know of any blogs I am missing — and I know that there are more bloggeras lesbianas alli– leave me a comment and I will work on fixing that!