From the category archives:

Best of FTST

Donor Sibling Registry: yay or nay or …

by Gail September 26, 2011

About six years ago, I got pregnant after insemination with frozen donor sperm, and nine months later Lyn and I had a baby girl, Leigh. Like most parents, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. Unlike most parents (but perhaps like many parents actually reading this), part of what we had no [...]

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Mother or Father?

by Lyn September 15, 2011

I’m enjoying the writing prompts on queer parenting at Regular Midwesterners, so I took a go at their second question. Josh and Gretchen ask: “Do you think of yourself as a “mother”? A “father”? Something in between? Why?” Five and a half years ago, my wife was pregnant with Leigh and I was in my [...]

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Do you love them differently?

by Lyn August 28, 2011

On Gail’s post a while back about what we call ourselves as parents (and in what contexts), Chris, whose partner is perhaps soon trying to conceive another child for their family, asked “I am very worried I will not (love) this child as much as mine. I worry I won’t treat them equally. Hetero women [...]

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Stereotype Breakers

by Lyn August 14, 2011

We’re friends with a family with a somewhat gender-variant son, Q, who likes pink and wears his hair long (and identifies as a boy, you can read their smart thoughts at labels are for jars). Leigh has played with Q a few times, and thinks he’s fabulous, and specifically asks if we can play with [...]

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Donor conception — is everything changing?

by Gail July 4, 2011
Thumbnail image for Donor conception — is everything changing?

Donor conception has been a hot news item lately. First, in May, came the ruling in British Columbia that shut down the practice of anonymous sperm donation in BC (the equivalent of the ID release in the US system is still available there). This is obviously a controversial ruling. There is talk that it could [...]

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How do we refer to parents in two-mom families?

by Gail April 5, 2011

I was recently reading an article about queer parents, “(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter” by Stacey and Biblarz, and hit up against a not uncommon academic term for a lesbian non-biological mother — “social mother.” The whole time I was reading the paper (which is really good, by the way) I kept [...]

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Third time?

by Lyn March 20, 2011

Things have been quiet around here for a while. There’s a reason. Much of our parenting/family wavelength for the last 6-12 months has been taken up deciding if we want to try for a third child. This blog is not really anonymous (anymore, it was when we were trying for Ira). Plenty of our real [...]

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An old scar, revisited

by Gail January 30, 2011

When Lyn was pregnant with Ira, I wrote about how talk about the donor, and about Leigh’s resemblance to me, was a little painful. Things have changed quite a lot in this area since Ira was born. For one thing, both Lyn and I are more comfortable with donor issues. We’ve talked to Leigh about [...]

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Who should birth the baby?

by Lyn October 1, 2010

Since many lesbian couples contain two working uteri, and possibly two women willing to conceive, choosing who will try to get pregnant is a place where lesbian couples have options that a straight families don’t.  In what follows, I’m making the assumption that both partners are open to pregnancy (though perhaps with a discrepancy in [...]

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Inducing Laction: A Wrap-Up of the Big Experiment

by Gail July 16, 2010

We know that a number of people end up here because they are looking for information on inducing lactation, particularly in a family with two moms. Now that the induction project has been over for some time, I wanted to gather all of the relevant posts in one location for anyone who might want to [...]

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“Maybe they won’t care”

by Lyn July 13, 2010

Regular readers know that there have been some shifts around here in how we’re thinking and talking about our donor. After several years of focusing only on our immediate family (and I believe rightly so), we feel things opening up around this topic, in good but sometimes intense ways. I watch like a hawk when anything [...]

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