Lately I have been hearing from women who would love for me to return to creating new podcasts. I took 2011 off from the work, but hope to return this year with new shows -- and perhaps a webinar series! I currently have 46 shows available, with more than 39,000 downloads. Here's what's available.

Our Choice Mom-friendly fertility clinic in the Los Angeles area, C.A.R.E. Fertility, has created this Fertility Ties resource for helping U.S. women nationwide find a fertility clinic, egg donor agency, fertility pharmacy, and much more in their area.

Thanks to Danielle for bringing this list of storybooks to my attention for those of us who have used alternative methods to bring our children into the world.

Thanks to the success of my book "Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman's Guide," I often get requests to talk with women about their particular concerns.

If this is of interest to you, please make contact and we'll arrange a time that works.

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.

Our recent event in Philadelphia owed a lot to Diane, who convinced me of the need to host a Choice Mom networking event there this year. Then she set about turning the wheels to help make it happen. She'll continue turning the wheels for the local women.

Two women from our 2010 Austin event have emerged to keep the conversations happening and the resources shared in that part of the U.S. Here's the story of one of them.

One of the most exciting developments I see for Choice Moms in the coming years is the opening up of the relatively new embryo donation frontier for those women whose own eggs aren't working. New players in the field are working with single women.

As we continue our look this month into alternatives to the "traditional" IUI route for Choice Moms, here are some great resources.

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?

When it was time to start finding coordinators to help Choice Moms do the work we do with the community, the first person I thought of was Kali, who has quietly been offering suggestions and moderation help for several years. Now you, too, can meet her as she steps out of the shadows to help manage our vast East Coast resources.

I met Jessica at our Raleigh event. She had driven in from Atlanta with Cyndi. They met after I let them know both were traveling from the same area, so they made contact, drove together, became friends, and will now co-moderate our new Atlanta conversation board.

Choice Mom Valerie offered up these questions to ask any prospective adoption agency before considering them for your single-parent adoption...

As we develop more (largely FREE!) e-books and other special guides for the Choice Mom community, I thought this would be a good place to list everything so far available. This list will grow, so keep checking back.

It's finally here! The Choice Mom Guide to Donor Sperm. Click here for the e-book, available as a complimentary guidebook for anyone who is choosing or has chosen sperm donation to build their family.

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.

We've been busy assembling new fertility resources for our large community in the Trying: Fertility stage. Use this link to our new page of medications involved in fertility treatment.

We have a new fertility team in the Choice Mom network. I'm happy to introduce Dr. Rudy Quintero, who runs his own clinic in the Los Angeles area. His team is starting us off with some tools about ovulation detection.

Thanks to Emily, as always, for stepping in as the primary voice in the United Kingdom to help women find their way on the Choice Mom journey. For our new emphasis on resources for our non-U.S. community, she started us off with this...

This new-and-improved website has been in operation now for nearly a year. I'd like to share some interesting new data about where we tend to be living, the stages we are in, and what we prefer to read on this website.

One of my favorite websites is CreatingaFamily.com, run by Dawn Davenport. Like me, she's developed a comprehensive resource for her community as a labor of love. Hers is specifically designed for anyone building families through adoption, egg and sperm donation, surrogacy. Here are highlights:

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

I learned that Adam Pertman has started writing an important blog that will address why all of us concerned about kids and family-building should pay attention to adoption issues. Here's what he says about the reason for his new blog:

Here it is! For a limited time, the special new baby for our Choice Mom community. Our Choice of ChoiceMoms.org tips from 2010, featuring everything from Organization to Building a Support Network, Q&A to Commentary.

My favorite part of this website and the Choice Mom networking events are the opportunities to learn the stories of others in our community. Here is a compilation of some of the best stories of 2010.

Consider supporting the work that goes into this website by using any of these affiliated marketing partners (Legos, Orbitz, Nick Jr., storybook publisher, etc.), who are offering the Choice Mom community these special deals:

As I begin exploring the area of embryo adoption for the Choice Mom community, I am finding partners in the area who can talk us through the wide open frontier it seems to be right now. Here are my notes from one recent conversation.

More Choice Moms are looking into embryo donation these days, perhaps because international adoption doors once open to single women seem closed right now because of protracted governmental regulatory issues. Here are a few things you should know about this growing family-building option:

At Thanksgiving time, it's easy to remind ourselves and our kids to be thankful and appreciative. But what about all the other days of the year? I recently read several good tips from one book that might help.

It's a very lonely road to take care of yourself and a premature child (or two). Let's collect our wisdom here about places to turn, stories to share, insight to offer.

Women on the Choice Mom discussion board are talking to each other this week about dealing with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). About 1 in 10 women find out eventually, often when they are unsuccessfully trying to conceive, that they suffer from PCOS, which is largely a hormonal imbalance.

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.

It is hard for singles to find proactive friends in the adoption world. This list will help you find the right ones. We don't recommend anyone as Choice Mom-friendly unless they are also open to the LGBT community.

We can't all be prepared. We lose our job. Emergencies tap our reserves. We find ourselves accidentally pregnant and not quite ready for the daunting responsibility we embrace. Here's one resource that is reaching out to offer help.

The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption is a great resource for information about foster care adoption. Here are some of the numbers they offered in National Adoption Month (November 2010) about the kids waiting in foster care for adoptive homes.

There are a lot of things to misunderstand about adoption. Test your knowledge here.

I couldn't get to Denver for the annual ASRM conference in 2010 which featured the latest findings in reproductive health. But I did compile some of the great information links that came out of it.

Thanks to partnerships with Choice Mom sponsors, starting in 2011 we will be able to send Welcome packages to new and expecting moms who are delivering or adopting.

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...

There are 20 major markets where Choice Moms live. There are Choice Moms everywhere, of course, but I'm focusing on 20 communities where this website gets the most traffic from single women. I'm building resource guides for the cities listed below, with your help.

At the ASRM convention in 2009 for reproductive medicine specialists, I finally found a company I wanted to work with for our many women pursuing at-home insemination. Since then, Sepal Reproductive Devices has become a primary sponsor of our Choice Chat podcasts.

As I've mentioned, one news source that I follow faithfully is BioNews, which publishes information about fertility and genetics out of the United Kingdom. Here are some of their latest reports of interest to the Choice Mom community.

When embarking on parenthood, we often become ready to explore new pathways to health, including acupuncture, energy healing and natural health care. These practitioners have actively worked on behalf of the Choice Mom community.

When you are feeling isolated, angry, depressed or confused about the Choice Mom path, the discussion boards have become a good place to vent and share. But sometimes we need someone who not only understands the Thinking to Being stages, but is specifically trained to talk with us about our emotions.

I am frequently asked by reporters how big the Choice Mom community is. While there is no census-taking data that reveals the answer, I can use our discussion boards as a way to gauge growth -- and the types of things we are most interested in talking about.

We tend to know how to set and achieve goals. But sometimes we need a nudge, or we're feeling low, and our competence as strong-minded women prevents us from seeking help. I'm always looking for ways to help us find the insights we need.

Are you a Toronto-area woman in debt because of fertility treatments and/or pending newborn? Are you on the Choice Mom path anywhere in the world and want to get out of debt? Then read this....

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.

When you are preparing to deliver a child on your own, finding the right pre- and post-partum doula can be vital to a Choice Mom. Listen to this podcast about finding the right one for you. Read more about doulas on this website. And recommend yours here in the comments field.

These mental health therapists have an interest in working with single women about grief, fertility, adoption, and other aspects of the Choice Mom journey. They have been recommended by Choice Moms.

This service is designed to recommend estate planners who have a special connection with the Choice Mom community, either through commendation by a Choice Mom client, or sponsorship of Choice Mom workshops or other educational resources (signified here with direct website links).

A woman who is preparing to write about the Choice Motherhood lifestyle in a community that doesn't think single parenting is such a good thing asked me to offer some resources. I realized that many of you might benefit from some of it, in your own conversations with others.

ONLY TEN COPIES LEFT IN PRINT! 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.

Are you struggling (alone) with the weight of deciding whether to persevere with costly fertility treatments? There are mental health counselors who specialize in the fertility industry who are here to help you. This is great, detailed advice from one of them.

There is nothing that prompts more questions on Choice Mom discussion boards than when a single woman is purposely trying to conceive. We quickly learn how little we know about something we've been taught can be so easy. The Choice Mom Guide to Fertility gathers the most common questions and answers them, with the help of 15 fertility specialists we interviewed specifically for this book.

In National Adoption Month I want to share some of the stories of single women who have become mothers because of adoption.

Adoptive Families continues to be one of the best sources available for women on the adoption path. Here are some great articles they've just announced about helping to educate your child's classmates and teachers about adoption.

There is no 1-2-3 formula to deciding whether the Choice Motherhood lifestyle is right for you. But there are a lot of ways to try to figure it out. This is a good place to start.

I am happy to announce that Choice Moms® is launching a growing library of regional resource guides for the Choice Mom community. The first guide is now available, with its ongoing collection of insights and tips offered by experts and single women specifically from the New York City area.

The latest addition to the regional guides now being offered on ChoiceMoms.org is for Choice Moms in the Washington D.C. area. Click here for the guide-to-date. I welcome your contributions to the service providers and experts in that area who you think Choice Moms should be aware of.

A new resource for Choice Moms will be regional guides for the cities where we have networked. Here's a work-in-progress for Choice Moms in Austin, based on notes from the networking event we held there in March 2010.

It's hard for self-sufficient women to ask for help -- or even acknowledge to ourselves that we need it. But we do. Even more than we care to admit, because we tend to be so hard on ourselves. This month I'm thinking about the kinds of support Choice Moms need, and how we can get and give it as a community.

A woman on the Alternatives to Marriage Project Facebook page wrote that she was denied coverage for fertility treatments because she isn't married. She's on the Choice Mom path. Let's weigh in on which insurance companies do a better job of coverage.

It is confusing to join the Choice Mom community as someone who is attempting to conceive and discover all these terms and abbreviations you've never encountered before. Here's a quick cheat sheet of the most common ones:

Nothing beats the recommendation of fellow Choice Moms about the doctors they entrusted to help them conceive. Following is a list of Choice Mom-recommended fertility specialists, with live links to fertility clinics that have supported in the past year the Choice Mom resources you find on this website and at our networking events. Use the comments field that follows to nominate your own favorites.

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.

In this week's tips from Choice Mom sponsor Laurel Fertility Center (San Francisco) we discuss the importance, and methods, of building a fertility support team for yourself.

I am happy to report that we have a new option to create five informal coffeeshop gatherings in a few cities in 2011. I'm reinvigorating an inquiry into which cities have women most interested in contact that they're not otherwise getting.

There were a lot of new and pending parents at the San Francisco event in May 2010. Here are some of the great resources that were suggested by attendees.

Uber organized Jessica, a Choice Mom in every way, will deliver her first child in a few months. While she was in the Thinking process -- preceding a long Trying phase -- she developed a worksheet that calculated how much she would need to spend trying to conceive, for prenatal care, for newborn items, and for post-delivery childcare expenses for a year. Here are the numbers she came up with.

We love reading stories with our kids about non-traditional families. Here are some of the books that have been recommended by Choice Moms.

Choice Moms Expo sponsor Joan Gilles, of Ameriprise Financial Services, offered this important tip about disability insurance. Admittedly, this is a form of insurance I hadn't given much thought to. But as single parents, there are a LOT of ways we need to be smart about protecting our assets, and this is one we need to understand.

I recently attended a talk by money counselor Ruth Hayden, author of "Your Money Life" workbook and many other resources for people who want to understand personal use (misuse?) of money and time. As she pointed out, the two are often linked. Here is some of what I learned.

This is a wonderful list of resources from Nurse Practitioners for any woman who is trying to conceive, from keeping track of period dates to taking an "Am I Pregnant?" quiz...to baby name sites...to prenatal care info...

A woman who currently lives in a European country that doesn't allow people to use donated egg or sperm asked the Choice Mom board for suggestions about where she might go for treatment options.

submitted by Deirdre Fishel
I began filming "Sperm Donor X," a 54-minute documentary, when I was 40 and found myself at a precipice. I wanted to have a biological child, yet doing it alone with donor sperm felt bizarre and terrifying. I had no idea how my story would end and I wanted to find other women facing the same turning point.

This is the start of a growing list to come about the adoption process:

Here is good reading material to keep you company as you journey through the Trying and Waiting stages of Choice Motherhood:

There are a lot of amazing women writing specifically about the single mother journey. Here are a few of my favorites:

There have been several documentaries made about the Choice Mom lifestyle. Here are clips from a few of them:

Long-time Choice Mom support Patricia Mendell hosts a monthly conversation to help families learn how to talk about non-traditional family-building with their kids. Dates: February 24, April 21, May 26.

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).

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.

It is important to understand the success rates of an IVF center before you invest. There are wide discrepancies. Here is a compilation of resources to help you understand the IVF process, as recommended from Choice Moms.