Our storybook created by Choice Moms, featuring artwork by Choice Kids, is called "I Felt You Flutter in My Heart."

Long-time Choice Mom support Patricia Mendell, who works with single women in the New York City area who are building families on their own, has announced a new monthly support group to help families (single and coupled) create healthy families using egg, sperm and embryo donation, as well as surrogacy.

I'm about to send my son off for a week to a camp near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area with two families (married couples, each with one child who is a good friend of his).

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.

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?

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.

Click below for the complimentary Choice Mom Guide to Donor Sperm, 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.

This post comes from Vera, co-editor with me of "Choice Mom Guide to Adoption," as she examines the probing questions she and her now-13-year-old twin daughters, adopted from Russia, have been asked over the years.

I'm very happy to report that 30 Welcome Kits went out to new Choice Moms last week. This is a special new perk to the Choice Mom community, which includes...

This Thinker shared her story on the Choice Mom discussion board after "lurking" for awhile, and there were so many good tidbits to share with the wider community that I asked for permission to excerpt it here.

We're kicking off February with a few stories of Choice Moms who intended to build a family with a partner -- and for various reasons didn't find the right One. In this story, we hear from a woman who has been through the wringer and is still torn.

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.

Tis the season. There is fun in Halloween tricks and treats with our kids. But for many, also the conflicts that come from the community time of Thanksgiving, Chanukkah, Christmas, New Year's. Feelings of isolation as summer frolicking turns into the more contemplative Fall and reclusive Winter seasons.

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.

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.

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.

I've been hearing more lately from women (and men) who don't have the easier community acceptance that many of us have grown accustomed to in North America. Here is one woman who reached out from South Africa, looking for community.

I've become acquainted with the very interesting work and brain of Harvard professor Steven Pinker, and have been reading his 2002 book "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature." So it was with pleasure that I read (pages 398-399) some of his thoughts on the nature vs. nurture debate as it relates to how we raise our children.

I lived in New York City 18 years, so it's always a little odd for me to fly in and out of town for a weekend workshop, as I've done the last two visits. But we do pack a lot of information-sharing and support into these events, and the NYC event held in July 2010 was quite dense with resources. Here is some of what we shared.

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.

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.

A group of women at a Choice Mom networking event discussed, with the help of counselor Krista Post, the nuances of talking about taking this path with close friends, family and colleagues.

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.

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. Here are some of the books that have been recommended by Choice Moms.

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.

A woman wrote to say that her friends were sharing the news of her Choice pregnancy with others, including the fact that she conceived with an anonymous sperm donor, even though she asked them not to. She turned to the community to get advice.

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?

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.

Karen offered this up on the discussion board. "After my 3-year-old god-daughter ran around the sushi bar last night repeating "sperm" and NOT using her indoor voice, I came up with these code phrases to talk about donor insemination:

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).

One woman on the Choice Mom discussion board noticed a pattern -- that others have agreed with -- about who tends to disapprove of the Choice Mom path, and who does not: