A new Thinker wrote to one of the discussion boards with a concern that her eventual child might someday feel like "a freak of nature" as a donor-conceived child.

A Choice Mom with a two-year-old son posted a few days ago on one of the discussion boards about the struggles she is having, and within two days there have been more than 20 responses. Here's some of what we're saying.

During our holiday meal, my 13-year-old little girl finally paid me a compliment. She told me, indirectly and as non-chalantly as she could, that I had influenced her.

I recently received this idea from a Choice Mom about how we might celebrate all of our families -- no matter the structure -- with a new idea. Please feel free to share at your schools and through your social networks!

It's been a very refreshing week. And coming home to this comprehensive review of my "Choosing Single Motherhood" book was a bonus.

Before our recent trip to New York City and D.C., I got in touch with a man I hadn't seen in nine years because my son wanted to meet him for the first time.

4. My child will not care about missing a father, or about knowing his genetic history.

Once upon a time we all think we know how our lives will turn out. Then, bit by bit, year by year, we discover that we don't have quite as much control over that as we think we do. Some control, yes. But sometimes the control we have about our destiny has more to do with perspective than actual wish fulfillment.

A will is a critical part of your estate plan, but it is only useful after your death. To protect yourself in the event that you are unable to speak for yourself, you must do more.

Primrose Schools, a family of 200 accredited private preschools around the U.S., offered these tips for keeping your kids' minds working this summer.

A woman recently wrote about how exhausted she is about the Trying stage. Several IUIs, an IVF, lots of money spent. She was tired, out of money, and wondered if she should give up what has been an obsession to become a mother.

Many of our children ask questions about their fathers, and right now, with Father’s Day approaching, we are all thinking and talking more about it. When we made the decision to become an SMC, this subject was, for many of us, the one which we were most concerned about, and rightly so. Deciding to raise a child without a father has a real impact on our children and on us.

I am a Choice Mom of twin girls who are now 6. I did artificial insemination in the U.S. with sperm that could not cross the border into Canada. This is my story of making contact with half siblings.

Jo-Anne Cutler is a Family Communication Specialist and Awareness coach, who helps people who are "stuck" make the shifts they need to experience more peace, fun and happiness in their lives. That extends to helping parents build the best stress-free environment to enable their kids to thrive.

How do we celebrate Father's Day?

A San Francisco Choice Mom wrote to me recently, asking how to address the half-sibling topic with her son. She's been in contact with two lesbian couples on the East Coast who have sons from the same donor.

This has come up so frequently lately that I want to focus our attention again on responses to these topics: What do we tell our children, and others, about how they were conceived? About why they don't have a dad?

Several years ago there was some measure of relief among Choice Moms -- and consternation among some others -- when author Peggy Drexler published Raising Boys Without Men that revealed that boys in homes headed by single mothers by choice and lesbian couples were doing quite well. Now she's published a book about the impact fathers have on daughters.

Here it is...the end of the month when we focused on Conscious Conversations, and it took me weeks to get to THIS conversation with you. Isn't that the trickiness of our lives? How to make time for what matters, when the minutia of everyday gets in our way.

A friend called out of the blue to ask to catch up after months of absence. We talked about how hard it is for him to find interesting women to talk to about non-superficial things, and how he wondered if he’d ever find a partner.

Madeline Feingold is a therapist on our Top 20 list of Choice Mom-friendly counselors, associated with Alta Bates IVF in San Francisco. She offered insight on the actual words a parent can use, starting at a young age, to talk to their child about being donor-conceived.

My youngest turned 7 the other day. That means we're about to do his flower, representing the important people in his life right now. It's a favorite new tradition we created when the "family tree" assignments started five years ago, when my daughter was his age.

A woman on the Choice Mom discussion board asked what she could do to better guarantee her child's genetic health from an anonymous donor.

This list was offered by Carrie Crompton at Cultural Care Au Pair, who is offering a great $500 discount to the Choice Mom community.

A Choice Mom who is always thinking of ways to boost the community emailed recently to suggest a "sperm sharing" service.

Before you know it, we realize our children are old enough to sometimes be home alone. For single parents, this can be a blessing -- not relying on babysitters every time we have to go to a neighborhood dinner party -- but the question is asked, how old should our children be before we entrust them?

Let's build a special mosaic of the beautiful children we are raising. Here's a start.

A 5-year-old Choice Kid started referring to a woman's ex-boyfriend as "daddy" even though he had proven to be not good father material and the mother had ended the relationship six months earlier. He hadn't been in their life since. The girl was saying that she "missed her daddy," even though she'd never referred to him that way before.

I've been reminded in the last week just how fragile life is. A Choice Mom friend unexpectedly lost her younger sister last week -- a mother of three -- in a tragic accident. And a neighbor couple are BOTH battling cancer, one of them terminal, with 7- and 9-year old daughters at home.

There is a national discussion starting in the Australian Parliament about how to regulate and legislate donor conception practices across federal and state lines.

Several years ago I got a call from the long-time co-founder of California Cryobank (CCB), gently and intelligently "checking me out" as an educational partner in his attempt to help his colleagues in the sperm bank industry understand why some policies needed to change. Since then...

A frequent topic of discussion on the Choice Mom boards is whether to have two children, and how to manage if you do. As one woman asked: "I'd love to hear the strategies you've used in order to provide each of your kids with enough time and attention."

A woman with two young children wrote to say that a half-sibling of her kids was traveling to the U.S. from another country and wanted to meet, since the children shared the same sperm donor. The mother didn't feel prepared to talk to her kids about how they were connected, yet didn't want to miss the opportunity to meet.

Years ago I collaborated with Wendy and Ryan Kramer, the mother-and-son co-founders of Donor Sibling Registry, on some new tools for families created by donor conception. This was one of them.

The topic of using estate plan templates -- kits with fill-in-the-blank options about guardianship and will issues -- came up among a group of single mothers by choice recently. A Choice Mom and attorney in the group offered her insight.

I am talking to sponsors about adding to our Choice Chat podcast library in 2013, and perhaps adding a webinar series. We currently have more than 42,000 downloads of 46 shows. Here's what's available.

On this 9/11 day, I wanted to reflect on the impact that day had on me as a Choice Mom. My daughter and I were living in New York City, about 20 blocks away from the World Trade Center, and until then I had no intention of leaving the city that had been my home for 18 years.

I get more melancholy about the end of summer than my kids do. They love school, and started the new school year today. About my own sadness about this time of year, I know that it's largely because my kids are the ones who teach me to play, not to work all the time.

submitted by Lori
Will you ever have to prove your donor child doesn’t have a father? When I gave birth to my daughter via anonymous donor IUI in 1999, I hoped that the information regarding her father would be left blank on her birth certificate.

Thanks to Jessica for suggesting this Dixie Chicks song for anyone in the Choice Mom community looking for inspirational music about becoming a single mother.

I've been asked by some to offer comment on the study about donor-conceived kids that was released in May 2010 by the Commission on Parenthood's Future, in conjunction with the Institute of American Values.

submitted by Christy
My daughter is 2.5 years old. She is a little girl who doesn't need to ask a lot of questions, doesn't seem to need a lot of prep information, and simply adjusts at the time to whatever is happening around her. She doesn't yet ask why she doesn't have a dad, or who her donor is. But other kids are now starting to do so.

It is more important to start your donor search with selection of the right sperm bank, before identifying donor characteristics. Arm yourself with this checklist of questions to begin the process.

Egg and sperm donor banks must adhere to certain safety standards, related to infectious disease testing. However, the donors themselves are not required to have genetic testing. That's why it's important for you to know the standards of the bank you want to work with -- and know what questions to ask.

I'm often asked how Choice Moms handle Father's Day. And we often wonder -- especially before we have kids, or when our children are quite young -- whether they are missing out on something important by growing up without a father.

One advantage of sperm donor conception is that you are looking at your eggs and a donor's sperm much more scientifically than if you were conceiving with a man you fell in love with. That means you have tools at your disposal to prevent potential medical problems for your child. Your sperm bank might have evaluated your donor’s family history, but have you had yours evaluated as well?

Lesbian and gay couples, and single women, have long been presumed by many to offer "worse" family structure for kids compared to two-parent heterosexual marriages. One new study reported in Time magazine indicates something we've long suspected. That might be a huge presumption.

Some time ago a librarian wrote to me asking that I send my various books for Choice Moms and donor-conceived families to the Library of Congress for cataloging. This stemmed out of her discovery that there are very few books about donor conception available. She compiled this list, however, of everything she had found to that point.

I returned from a primitive island camping trip with another Choice Mom, two dads, and the seven kids we have who have known each other for years. And one of the 30 emails waiting for me from the long weekend was the link to a blog from Kat Wilder, who is trying to understand who Choice Moms are, and why we do what we do.

Susan Golombok is the Cambridge University-based researcher who did the first large-scale study of the Choice Mom community in 2008. Some of those findings are posted here. Now she's published a new report of other research into female-headed families.

May is "Money Matters" month on the website. This month we'll take a look at what we're learning and sharing, from each other and from experts, about financial matters. Starting with this week's Choice Mom query: As parents who might expect more help from our kids, but with one paycheck, how do we handle allowances?

There are several great options for creating your own storybooks for your adopted or donor conceived child. Here are some of them.

We love reading stories with our kids about non-traditional families. And we actively seek information about alternative family-building for ourselves. Here are recommendations.

Interestingly, the most popular conversation circle at my upcoming Choice Mom Expo in Minneapolis is "Taming tantrums: yours and child," with parenting educator Denise Konen. Even 11 years into parenting, I didn't realize how important this topic is to our motherhood community. Here's one of the suggestions Denise has.

Well here it is...the public debate between a Glenn Sacks father's rights crony (Robert Franklin) and myself on PublicSquare.net. Read, laugh, seethe, comment. I actually love the opportunity to offer a rational perspective, even if my opponent has a decidedly different viewpoint. Such as Franklin's view that Choice Moms often trick men into having kids and then lie to keep them out of the child's life. Here's a synopsis, with links to the full debate.

Thanks to the CreatingaFamily.org website for alerting me to this great Newsweek article about international adoption, from the grown child's perspective.

When your uncle is also the sperm donor who helped your lesbian parents conceive, you might presume "the" conversation about your origins would be a hard one. And what happens afterward?

Do you feel rushed? Exhausted? Like you don't have enough time with your kids? Take five minutes out of your schedule to read and contemplate this. Then share an idea of how to pause in your own life every day.

There are three things Choice Moms report in hindsight are their biggest regrets. What do you think they are?

Years ago, when my daughter was in kindergarten, the infamous family tree assignments started to come from school. To allow for the fact that Choice families don't have a "father's side" to fill in, we came up with our own solution. Now it's become a family tradition.

A majority of families using donor conception do not report births after the fact. This has a tremendous impact on the industry. The numbers of offspring born to a sperm donor, and even to egg donors, are generally vastly under-reported. If there is a genetic abnormality that surfaces in later years, families cannot be notified.

I have talked to many experts -- including donor-conceived adults -- about the pros, cons, strengths and weaknesses of anonymous and open-identity donor conception as the method to building a family. Listen in:

We're building an audio library featuring the best of our Choosing Single Motherhood radio show and Choice Chat podcasts. You can order the first of this collection, "Choice Moms Answer the Tough Questions: Do I Have a Dad?" (formerly a CD product, available here for immediate $7 download).

Once upon a time, doctors advised infertile couples to keep the fact of donor conception a secret from everyone, including the child. Led partly by the lessons of adoption, and especially with more importance today placed on knowing ones genetic markers and family medical histories, being able to make limited contact with the donor someday has become encouraged.

Have you wondered what offspring conceived from donor sperm think about as they get older?

It's hard to find baby books that don't have the obligatory "how I met your dad" and two-sided family tree chart to fill in. But there are options. Here are some of them.

Choice Moms was a "word of the year" contender in 2009 by New Oxford's New American dictionary. I created the term only five years ago in my "Choosing Single Motherhood" book to put the emphasis on Choice, not Single, in our motherhood journey.