DADsquared℠

A question asked by my six year-old daughter the other day. The first thing I did was ask her if she remembered what gay meant. Mostly she did (when a girl has special grown-up friendships with girl and a boy with a boy), though I did have to remind her that sometimes people have special grown-up friendships with boys and girls. Then I told her that I am gay and when you’re a girl and you’re gay you’re called lesbian. I am a lesbian but that doesn’t make us a gay family because lots of families are made up of people who are gay and straight. As for her, well, some people get a sense of whether they are gay or straight when they’re little but many others don’t figure it out for sure until they are adults. I assured her that whenever she figured it out is fine, whether she turned out to be gay or straight is also fine, and if she changes her mind that’s okay too. She didn’t have to be gay to be in our family. We’re not a gay family. We’re a family....

The holidays are approaching.   This means a lot of things to my family and me.   Most Importantly it means we are going to North Dakota for Thanksgiving.   What?   North Dakota?   I know, I know, its sooo Middle America, but that’s where my partner is from and that’s where his family is.   Since this is the time of year where we remember to be thankful, I want to give you and idea of what his family means to me. I look forward to this trip every year.   My partner can take it or leave it.   He loves his family but he is more concerned about spending that $1000.00 on new landscaping or updates to the house, not plane tickets.   I love all that stuff also, but to me family time is more important.   I remember the first year T and I were dating. We went to ND to visit for Thanksgiving and I got to meet a big part of his family.   There was his mom, his step dad, his sister, her husband and their two kids...

           Sorry for being gone so long!   We've had a heck of a life transition lately and unfortunately, my writing had to go on the back burner.   In July, my better half had weight loss surgery and as of this writing, is down nearly 80 pounds.    On top of that, my school schedule this semester has been pretty labor intensive and then there are those three kids that keep eating my food and leaving messes around the house.   I officially have a teenager now and he is making sure I know it.   I don't mind him getting older but I wish he'd quit dragging me along with him. I have had some amazing, life altering experiences over the past few months.   To be honest, I've spent a lot of my quiet moments reflecting on my life and the role I play in this World.   I work in a hotel and I have gay couples who check in often.   Recently, we had a group of our Marines retu...

Nearly two years has passed since we introduced the word DADsquared to the world. It began with the  Facebook page  and this blog but it quickly became more. DADsquared became a home for men (and women) all around the world searching for a missing piece in their lives, and that missing piece was children. Since it's birth, DADsquared has seen the world of Gay Dads rise to such unbelievable heights that I often stand back in awe. Our making Babbles Top 50 Blogs for 2012 is certainly proof of that. We have seen countless numbers of new families being created. We have been guided and help guide many people towards parenthood. We have forged relationships with some amazing attorneys, surrogacy agencies, adoption agencies and all sorts of professionals who's expertise in helging LGBT families grow is undeniable. As we ourselves grew we found ourselves building DADsquared in the same way we build families, with hope, blind faith and trust. In c...

It was Friday night and we just dropped off our 6yr old at the gymnastics center’s “Parents night out”.   Maybe your city has this?   Our local trampoline place does this as well as our gymnastics place.   You pay $25.00 and you can leave your kids there from 7pm to midnight.   The kids get to play all night, they get pizza, snacks and usually they have a lot of friends from school there.   They will even post photos of the kids playing on Facebook.   Sounds great right?   Well it was a tough week of work for my partner and I.   Our little guy had swim practice Monday and Wednesday, yoga on Tuesday, Kumon (after school learning program) on Tuesday and Thursday and art class on Friday.   He needed a distraction too.    We headed to the gymnastics place to drop him off and there was the usual “Ok, dads, kiss me goodbye out here in the parking lot so my friends don’t think I’m a baby”.   Then we go...

Each child welcomed into a LGBT family is a victory. It’s true. LGBT couples must overcome great complications and often incredible sacrifice to bring a very wanted and loved child into their family. When it finally happens, there is reason for great celebration. But if this child is welcomed through adoption, joy untempered by respect for the unfathomable loss the child has suffered misses an incredibly important opportunity. Recently, two LGBT couples I know welcomed a child into their family through adoption. And while I understand their joy, I REALLY do, I found myself feeling uncomfortable with both couples’ expressions of seemingly unfettered glee on social media. It’s true that they may have had many more complex feelings than they posted on social media. After all, who among us hasn’t put a little positive spin on a story for the benefit of the Facebook universe? But if they didn’t and they completely ignored the hard part of adoption, they did a great di...

So I picked up my son from daycare yesterday and was informed that he had been put in his first "Time Out." We have been attempting this at home with very little success. He is nearly two and getting him to sit for any lenght of time in any part of the house is next to impossible. He's a good boy, don't get me wrong, but lately his fasination with our pets has taken a slightly more uncomfortable turn, namely for the dogs. He has realized that running trucks into them gets them to make sounds he never dreamed possible and that chasing them with said trucks makes for such an awesome game, again, not so much for the dogs. We've tried the taking away of the truck, (his favorite toy) and calmly explaining the what's and the why's of this terrible punishement but unfortunately we can barely hear our own calmess over the giant sized screams that somehow come out of out tiny little angel. The screams only stop when he has either...

It was early one afternoon and my boy said, “Can you play with me?”   “No, I’m working, “, I said.     “No you aren’t, you are looking at Facebook” my boy pointed out. , OK, I did feel a little guilty and decided to play with him for a few minutes.   He said, “I want to be superman and you can be the bad guy”.   I decided, “Ok, I’ll be Captain Butt Kicker.” “Whose that?”, He asked.    “That’s the bad guy that kicks you in the butt if you get to close to him”, I said.    Well that got him going and he went running through the house. He ran past the one side of the kitchen so I bolted to the other side hoping to cut him off as he was going by.   As I ran to the other side of the kitchen, I put on the brakes, pivoted on one foot and turned suddenly and then “SNAP”, I felt something in my lower right leg pop out of wherever it was supposed to be,   and it hit the back of my leg behind the ...