Still no sign of baby #2 yet! I am having some contractions at night that make me think it may happen soon! I have been having a hard time getting out of bed… especially because I get up at least 4 times, either for the bathroom, or for Grace…

Perhaps driven to compete with former View cohost Rosie O'Donnell (long famed for her haiku-riffic stream-of-consciousness bloggery), Elisabeth promises "12 personal stories recounting her experiences and emotions both before and after the birth of her second child, due later this month, along with photos of the new baby."

I have heard that blogging about babies is a popular pastime now, and I can see the positive benefits that might come from keeping a record of the baby's growth and development. We used to have scrapbooks for such things, but now the Internet serves as a repository for these records, along with all sorts of thoughts and debates that motherhood brings. For moms, it can be a respite from the isolation some suffer after leaving the workplace. Replies to their blogs can help them feel that they are sharing the "new mom" experience, or quell their worries that their child is the only one with a behavior problem or developmental delay. Blogging while the baby sleeps seems OK.

On the other hand, blogging has a potential for abuse, especially if it becomes a substitute for interacting with the child, or a place to lodge daily complaints against the father, or serves mainly to satisfy exhibitionistic urges. I can't judge your brother's specific case, but in general, diaries and journals have been replaced by the Internet, and your sister-in-law has jumped on the bandwagon, hopefully with taste and moderation.

The new blog directory will be designed with an eye toward helping mothers find mom bloggers through keyword searches and tags. They'll be indexed by similar interests, number of kids and region of the country. The site will also offer non-blogging mothers advice on how to start. Organizers hope to get existing bloggers to participate by bringing them traffic and offering tips on how to increase their audiences. J&J recruited a panel of "top mom bloggers" to advise the company on this initiative. "We didn't go into this as experts, for sure," Lindsay Kalaw, product director at Johnson's Baby, told ClickZ. "We've learned a lot about the blogging community. We wanted to identify moms seen as influential in this space and we asked them, 'What would you be looking for from a blog directory?'"

Instead of walking to each other's desks and trading stories, the plan is to write them down here, so that: 1. Lots of you will check this blog out and tell your friends; 2. Bringing untold riches to the Chronicle, which will; 3. Reward us with huge bonuses, and then; 4. We can all send our kids to Head Royce.

The Poop is Peter Hartlaub, Heather Maddan, Aidin Vaziri and Delfin Vigil. Aidin and Peter have 1-year-olds, Del has an 8-month-old and Heather has a 2-year-old and is due with her second child in late October. (Giving us 3 1/2 months to convince her to live blog her birth!)

Mamarazzi is a new blog devoted entirely to making fun of celebrity parents and those crazy things they do "because celebrity parenting is so easy to snark." It was born to the Blogosphere on April 30th and is the brainchild of several seasoned mommybloggers: Angie from Home Grown, Lisa from Nihaus, Lucinda from Suburban Turmoil, M'Kay from Petroville, Poppy from The Opiate of the Masses, and Susie from The Underpaid Kept Woman.

With all due respect to scrapbookers, scrapbooking doesn't count -- in my mind, people who scrapbook are artists, and scrapbooking is an art form. I'm talking about those books that have places for you to fill in "baby's first tooth," or "baby's first words" -- do you parents out there still manage to complete these? Or have you found that blogging and scrapbooking have taken over? What do you do to record memories of your children's lives?