Great post, Tessa! I, too, wondered the same thing as Ari brought home a batch of HOMEMADE Valentine's Day cards. The school asked us to bring some in, so I BOUGHT mine at Target. I then wrote in Ari's name on all of them, although I noticed that some kids in his class could write their names, which made me feel doubly guilty. Sigh. -Elisa

My DD, who is not yet 3, came home from day care today with a bag full of Valentines.  Eight mothers, bless their souls, spent an admittedly short amount of time writing out Valentines Day cards to their kid's classmates WHO CAN'T EVEN READ.  One mother went seriously overboard and gave each toddler a little Chinese carton full of chocolate, with a little computer printed card with DD's name on it, and her son's.  I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and think she knew I would be eating the chocolate.  Jane's mother, a very nice woman, made homemade cards that she had her daughter scribble all over.  Very sweet.

A few days ago, Karina called me at work and said she needed to speak with me. She was very upset and said that she had just found out that one of her friends is pregnant. She's 13.

Karina approached her when she noticed her crying and asked if she was ok. That's when her friend told her the news. Her friend asked for advice on what she should do. Karina told me that all she could think of was to say, over and over, "Talk to your mother." Karina said, "I don't understand how she hasn't gone to her mother with this!" I told Karina that we would continue the conversation when I got home from work. But my mind began to race the moment I hung up the phone. What was I going to say?

About a month ago, I took my daughter and niece to the movies to watch JUNO. In case you haven't heard, Juno is a movie about teenage pregnancy:

Juno (Ellen Page) is a Mid-Western highschooler, who decides one day, out of boredom or curiosity, to have sex with her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), a member of her school's track team. She likes him well enough, but isn't hung up on him. This one time encounter results in Juno's pregnancy. She and her best friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby) decide to take control of the situation by browsing for prospective adoptive parents in the local Pennysaver newspaper, and Juno settles on seemingly the perfect, affluent couple Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa Loring (Jennifer Garner) who is desperate to have a child. Junos sensitive father (J.K. Simmons) and stepmother (Allison Janney) are very supportive of her and help Juno with her decision to give the baby up for adoption. Juno and her father check out Mark and Vanessa Loring to see if they are the right couple. As time moves closer to having the baby, Juno grows more into a woman, yet she is still a teenager with all the same problems and a few more.

I LOVED the movie, and so did the girls. But part of me wondered if Juno's parents' reaction was a realistic one? How would I react if Karina came to me and said she was pregnant, AND had done the research, AND had made the decision to give the baby up for adoption? I honestly don't know.

When I got home, karina and I had a LONG talk. I told her that she should never feel afraid to tell me anything that was going on with her. I told her that I hoped she really thought things through before it actually got to the point of deciding to have sex with someone. She looked at me with unwavering eye contact and said, "Mommy, don't worry...I'm not that type of girl". Those words echoed in my head..."that type of girl".  What did that mean? So I told Karina, "Your friend made a mistake, she's scared and she doesn't know what she's going to do or how her family is going to react. Is THAT the type of girl you mean?" Then I went on to explain that this type of thing can happen to ANY "type of girl". You could be the shy, straight "A" student who decides to have sex for the first time and ends up pregnant, or you could be the school slut. But really, does it matter? I told her that I wanted her to have the best in life, and having a child when you're still a child isn't my idea of having the best life. I said, "Why would you want to have the life that you're going to have when you're 40, now? Wait until you're 40! You shouldn't have to worry about kids, money, bills, insurance and the uncertainty of your future! You have the rest of your life for that!"

Then I started thinking about her poor friend and I wondered...is teenage pregnancy contagious?

According to the Planned Parenthood website, approximately 97 per 1,000 women aged 15-19 become pregnant each year. Moreover, because the average age of menarche has reached an all-time low and because four out of five young people have sex as teenagers, a greater proportion of teenage girls are at risk of becoming pregnant.

So I wondered what the school is going to do once they find out about the girls pregnancy? Are they going to make her leave the school once she starts showing? Is that fair? Does she have rights, or has she given them up because she got pregnant? Should the school use her as an example, a "if you get pregnant like her, you won't be allowed to attend school like a normal 13-year-old"?

So I pose the question to you, my fellow MT's...what's fair? What's right? What do you think?

We've had a lot of boy diaries. Here is one about girls...Elisa

OK it’s my turn. I’m having a girl and while I am at time beyond happy that she appears to be healthy and that I will someday have someone to get pedis with, there are other times I am terrified.

Ladies, I need your perspectives on a (down)side of pregnancy that I really wasn't aware of two years ago.  I am having a really horrible time with all the physical changes that have happened in my body since having a kid.  This is stuff that I never thought about, and I'm trying to figure out what is normal, and what I need to fix.  Oy.

At the risk of getting banned from this site forever and ever, the one downside of pregnancy that everybody knows about was never a problem.  I sweated the weight away in about two weeks.  Not through exercising, mind you, but through night sweats.  I had been so sick throughout my pregnancy that I only ever gained 20 pounds.  By the time I sweated it all out, I actually ended up 10 pounds lighter than I had been before the pregnancy.

Ok, please, put down the bats.  Really, there's more.  (And I've put the 10 pounds back on anyway through my amazingly bad eating habits.  Yay me.)

(I originally wrote this for Bay Windows (December 13, 2007), an LGBT newspaper, and focused on the commonalities between single straight moms and lesbian moms, coupled or not. Most mainstream coverage of the book, however (e.g., Newsweek), has focused on the issue of whether a woman can or should raise kids without a father if she doesn't have an appropriate man in her life. Take the discussion here any way you choose....)

Louise Sloan’s new book, Knock Yourself Up: No Man? No Problem: A Tell-All Guide to Becoming a Single Mom (Avery: 2007), is something of a novelty. It is perhaps the only parenting book by an out lesbian mom that is directed at a mixed audience, lesbian and not. While some books about single motherhood are inclusive of lesbian moms to varying degrees, and some books about lesbian parenting state they are also appropriate for single straight moms, Sloan goes beyond them and weaves the experiences of herself and other lesbians with those of straight women in an even-handed way that makes neither group feel like outsiders.

The book features her own perspective as a single mom by choice, as well as the voices of 43 other women whom she interviewed at length, representing a wide variety of backgrounds and choices on the path to parenthood. Sloan says she wanted her book to be "a lively support group in text form, offering a diversity of perspectives," and in this she succeeds. Chatty, informal and at times laugh-out-loud funny, there is nevertheless much practical information in the women’s stories and Sloan’s asides.

Some people, of course, feel single moms by choice are selfish and view men as unnecessary, the same argument many throw at lesbian moms. Sloan, however, argues "What the straight women in this book rejected was not men or marriage - it was the idea of getting into a bad marriage, or the wrong marriage, just to have kids. . . . In fact, many have made the decision to bear a child out of wedlock because they respect marriage too much to enter into it lightly for reasons of social and procreational expedience." For lesbians, the marriage situation is somewhat different, but the idea is the same: Don’t force yourself into the wrong relationship just to have a parenting partner. The de-linking of marriage and procreation, however, is one of the many reasons the book has already garnered a number of far-right detractors, who also seem to believe the lack of a dad means a troubled life for the child -- an assertion disproven by credible research. Straight single moms by choice and lesbians, coupled or not, may find common cause here, an alliance that in my opinion has yet to be fully explored.

So I could be pregnant.  Or not.  I mean, I'm on the pill, but missed a few when I had stomach flu in nearly November.  I also took diflucan in November, which could interact with my pill, but could not.  And I was late by a few hours on my pills a couple days late in the month.  I don't have a period because I'm on Seasonale (which I love) but I'm spotting a little (which is something that's only happened when I was pregnant the first two times) and to tell you the truth...I'm ambivalent.

November 30, 1997

The Denver Broncos beat the San Diego Chargers 38-28 on the way to Elway's first
Superbowl victory.

I looked like this, packing 11 pounds of baby, and gamely waited until victory was in hand to utter, with a crampy grimace, "I think we should go."

At 12:25 and 12:27 a.m. on December 1st, the twins arrived--weeks before their December 25th due date--making the family Christmas card with only days to spare.

Happy Birthday, Sweet Devon!

Happy Birthday, Sweet Ryan!

Being a progressive, liberal-minded political activist mom who learned everything about what NOT to do from my own mom, I set out to have this warm, open, communicative relationship with my children. I envisioned us sharing our inner most thoughts, feelings, dreams and aspirations and them including me in their plans of becoming sexually active, seeking my advice over others and maybe being the open mom that their friends could come to as well.

Some of you may remember how troubled I was about my living situation.  Dh, and 2-year-old DD and I were living in West Oakland, and during our 1.5 years in the area, there'd been over 50 or 60 shots fired not 200 yards from our home.  When we moved in there was relative peace and quiet, but after we'd been there a while, it got baaad.  The last straws were the 3 year old on the corner getting grazed during a drive-by (she's perfectly okay now) and one night that involved 20 to thirty (maybe more) shots fired into our neighborhood.

I have had a couple of very bad days.

Last Friday, my husband and I blithely set off for our first sonogram.  Since I'm only 7 weeks pregnant (according to the calendar, mind you), it occurred to me that this one was a lot earlier than with my first pregnancy.  But my doctor or her aide (since I had only talked to the aide so far, not the doctor!) hadn't mentioned any concerns about the pregnancy to me, so it never occurred to me to be worried.

I have strange reactions to being pregnant.

I get irrationally angry when people guess that I'm pregnant.  I'm only 6 weeks along, so there is no baby bump to be seen yet.  However, a woman of a certain age is apparently not allowed to get sick.  I was in a training class for my new job, and I called in sick twice over the several week class with, I swear to God, food poisoning.  My stomach clearly does not like the salads in the cafeteria.  On the last day of class, I was told by well-meaning, perfectly lovely classmates (ironically, as I was on the phone checking my messages to see if the doctor had called with my results) that there are bets out on whether or not I'm pregnant.  I was so peeved, I have been trying to figure out ways to hide my pregnancy for as long as frickin' possible so as to delay proving all these people right.  (I have excellent precedent for this--I didn't tell work about my first pregancy until I was 5.5 months along.  And I only did it then because they wanted to send me to India.)  I get very angry at the thought of hearing them say "we knew it!!!"  For god's sake, why can't food poisoning just be food poisoning?

Earlier this week, I listened to a pregtastic podcast, something I've enjoyed during the course of my pregnancy, and I learned all about BOLD which stands for Birth on Labor Day.  The play, Birth, was written by Karen Brody.  The idea of BOLD is to use the month of September to educate people about the realities of childbirth in the US using this compilation of birth stories.  According to Karen Brody, BOLD has really taken off, this is only the second year and it has already expanded across the globe with showings in many major cities.