OK, all together now: we're not mommy bloggers, we're "Online Shrines to Parental Self-Absorption"! At least we don't have to answer the "what is a blog, anyway?" question anymore when we go by our new not-very-acronym-friendly title.

When David Hochman (who, just for the record, is not a mommy, so how could he possibly know anything from mommies) passed down his judgment from his perch atop the New York Times Sunday Styles section, he raised the hackles of not a few of his subjects, in addition to those of us who toil in self-absorbed obscurity. So, here you are: a roundup of some of the best quips and quotes from around the web.

, who was everyone’s fave even before becoming a mama (and we love not only because her daughter is so abso-frickin’-lutely gorgeous), reports her reaction when seeing the front page of the online Times on Sunday: “I had a hard time containing my glee — not because I and some of my fellow women writers were made out to be selfish, resentful, overreacting pigs in search of validation … — but that my child’s green eyes were staring at me from the pages of a national paper.”

Fussy cut right to the chase in her post that fateful day: “Good morning, I’m humorless and resentful, as are many moms who blog. We overscrutinize our children’s every excretion and whore out adorable anecdotes about them just to get attention for ourselves!”

I liked Ben MacNeill’s comment (you know him as Trixie’s daddy) for its brevity in the face of overwhelming lack of spell checking: ”*One small correction to the article. My last name is spelled with eight ‘L’s, not one. It’s MacNeillllllll.”

Suburban Bliss has lots of witty things to say about how Hochman pulled out her tongue-in-cheek comment that her two-year-old might be gay. And she sums up her feelings elegantly: “In the end what this article shows me, once again, is that we can’t win no matter what we do. If we aren’t worried about our kids we’re neglectful. If we think (and write) about the things our kids do we’re called hand wringing obsessives. Hooray New York Times for capturing the essence of mothering!”

Lots of bloggers pointed me to MUBAR’s analytic, heartfelt and must-readable response. A teaser: “For me, the question is not whether blogging about parenting is self-absorbed but why blogging about parenting is considered more self absorbed than writing about, say, one’s trip to the North Pole by dogsled?  The very act of writing tends to be a self-absorbed one (not many good books were written in a team setting) so why is it worth discussion that writing about parenting might be no different?  Is it because the self is supposed to be tucked away in a heart-shaped locket during labour only to be sprung free when the children go off to college?”

Finally, Leery Polyp has an introspective piece that wonders why the Times can’t afford a proofreader and has this to say: “See, this is the thing about the blog world: it is a microcosm of The World, its goodness, its humor, and its ugliness as well. The prejudices of the world — parenting is boring; focusing on children is dull; writing about children is selfish; not writing enough about children is selfish — all are magnified. Cliques and angers and petty slights are enlarged; gestures of kindness are amplified. It is at once raw and open to the whole world, and an artifice more elaborate than the ‘face to meet the faces that you meet’ T. S. Eliot wrote about in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’”

And if there were any justice in the world, if things were in their rightful place, then these parents would be the ones who were paid to add their witty, poetic, inspirational, insightful, and downright fabulous words to the world, instead of those at the New York Times. I’d just like to thank David Hochman for inspiring me to jump from blog, to blog, to blog all week, to discover amazing writers I hadn’t been reading and re-discover ones I hadn’t visited in a while, to hear all these mothers and fathers coming together in a melodic chorus about community and voice and the power of writing it all down. And I have to say, thank God that these things weren’t written in someone’s journal to be discovered 80 years from now in an attic, thank the Internet that I can read them today. I’m a better parent, and a better writer, for all of you.