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This launches a new weekly column chronicling the extremes of competitive parenting.

It's a competitive sport, this child-rearing thing.

First you need the unique baby name. Then you have to push the celebrity stroller. The latest trend in the Baby-Off (like hockey playoffs, but with your child) is blogging. When one of my mommy friends told me about her blog -- where, nightly, she posts photos of her newborn -- I immediately felt that Baby-Off kick in the gut. It was the way I felt when people told me their child spoke sentences at five months while, at 13 months, mine's only word was Dada -- and she said that to plants.

I'm now addicted to the maternal blogosphere. According to Technorati, which tracks stats on blogs, about 10,000 blogs are started each day by people writing about their children. So why did I spend so much energy trying not to bore all my fabulous friends with details about The Dictator (a.k.a. Rowan, my two-year-old)?

Now I can tell everyone things like: "Today when I was singing, The Dictator told me to 'Be quiet!' " All I have to do is blog! It's putting the "me" back in "Mommeee!"

Of course, keeping up with the blogs keeps me kind of busy. There's http://www.mommybloggers.com, http://www.bloggingbaby.com, and http://www.tomama.blogs.com. Then there's underpaidkeptwoman.blogspot.com, mommyneedscoffee.com, and a blogger who calls herself crabbykate, at trippingthelifeunbalanced.blogspot.com, who tells a laugh-out-loud tale of her toddler getting out of her new "big girl" bed and getting into her mascara.

Reading mommy blogs is free therapy. Feel isolated? So does the mom at inbabyjail.blogspot.com, who writes, "After Mary goes to bed I sit here, resenting the fact I am trapped in this dumpy little house all alone."

Misery loves company, obviously; some mommy bloggers get 5,000 hits a day. Well, I'll get 6,000!

That's right, you read it here first: I'm mommy blogger 10,001 today, thanks to a very nice woman who helped me set it up (I am a mother, after all. I don't have the time). So check out ninepounddictator.blogspot.com, for my thoughts on, well, something about being a modern mother. I can't stand losing Baby-Offs. I wouldn't be a modern mother if I did.