JEN WOODILL GETS WHAT SHE WANTS. Ten years ago, she met Alex Vamos at a chaotic New Year’s Eve house party thrown by a friend and spent the night following her around, flirting shamelessly. “It was a really intense crush,” Woodill explains. Vamos was intrigued as well, and when the party turned into a sleepover because of heavy snowfall, the two hooked up.

They have been together ever since. Vamos, now 32, completed a master’s in women’s studies at York and works for the City of Toronto, funding community programs. The 33-year-old Woodill oversees volunteers for the Heart and Stroke Foundation. They live in a three-bedroom house in the Beach with their fast-growing son, Morgan. Now almost three years old, he has piles of toys from his doting grandparents, plus a big boy’s bed (he just got that a year ago) and a giant ball that he plays with inside the house, even though he knows he’s not supposed to. He likes Dora the Explorer, goes to French daycare, and spends weekends running around the couple’s backyard, usually climbing up and over his plastic Little Tikes playhouse.

Their street is full of young families, and Woodill and Vamos swap babysitting services and toilet-training tips just like everyone else. Five and a half years after gay marriage was legalized and four decades after homosexuality was decriminalized, lesbian parents are unremarkable. According to the 2006 census, there are 3,785 same-sex couples raising children in Canada, and almost half of those live in Ontario. But the composition of those families is changing. A decade ago, when Canadian family law was less protective of same-sex parental rights, lesbian couples were reluctant to include their sperm donors in family life, afraid that it would dilute their custodial rights if a dispute arose. As same-sex parents have become more common, they’ve grown more confident and flexible in the way they define family. Some are now including a sperm donor or surrogate as part of the formula.

Woodill and Vamos decided to co-parent with a gay couple. Morgan has two moms and two dads. There are complica­tions, of course, in this new kind of arrangement, but so far Morgan, the nucleus of this particu­lar family unit, likes it just fine.

WHEN THE TWO WOMEN began to talk about having a child, Vamos wanted to go to a sperm bank; it would be simple, she thought, and free from the emotional or legal attach­ments of involving anyone else. She knew of women who’d ended up in custody battles with their donors. “It’s the kind of thing that fills you with fear,” Vamos says. Then she read The Kid, a memoir of an open adoption by the gay journalist Dan Savage. She was touched by the empathy that Savage and his partner had for their son’s mother. “I saw the poten­tial value of including another person,” Vamos says. “Yes, life is risk, but I saw in his book a positive story about a different kind of family.”

Woodill preferred the idea of a known donor from the outset. So in December 2001, they began their search, telling friends to spread the word. Two months later, they received an e-mail from Neil Semer, a voice teacher who lives in New York and visits his students in Toronto monthly. Though they’d never met, he was interested in discussing what he called their “parenting concerns.” Vamos wrote him back and was explicit about what they were looking for: a donor who would be willing to have a relationship with the child. Woodill and Vamos weren’t interested in financial support, and they wanted the father to relinquish custodial rights. Semer suggested getting together the next time he was in Toronto.

The three met for dinner at Astoria on the Danforth, halfway between Semer’s classroom and the Roncesvalles condo where the women then lived. The conversation got off to an awkward start, with the immensity of the proposed arrangement hanging in the air. Semer was 20 years older than them, as was his long-term partner, Jim Luisi. The men were both successful: Semer teaches opera in New York and Europe; Luisi is the CEO of a hospital in north Boston. They travel a lot, spending their weekdays working in separate places and their weekends together in New York. Semer told them that he had turned down previous requests from lesbian friends who wanted a donor without any involvement—he wanted to be a father. After a few glasses of wine, the three made a decision: since the women weren’t looking to get pregnant in the immediate future, they would spend time getting to know each other and take it from there. “We’ve eaten at every Greek restaurant in the city,” Vamos deadpans about their year of meetings.

Semer and Luisi were both members of a gay running club when they met on the Philadelphia Bridge in 1988. Exactly one year later, they exchanged rings and (legally unrecognized) vows on the bridge. They later became legal “life partners” in Germany, where Semer has many students, followed by a ceremony in Massa­chusetts when that state recognized same-sex marriage. “We’re very married,” says Semer. But his sudden interest in fatherhood spurred months of heated discussions with his partner. Semer’s arguments were emotional: his own desire to be a father, and his deepening connection with Vamos and Woodill. Luisi was concerned that it would be difficult for a child to have two parents who were almost old enough to be grandparents. Ultimately, Luisi felt obliged to at least consider the idea. “This is something Neil really wanted with a passion,” he says. “Who am I to deny him that?”