Many of you must know all about the message boards at Urbanbaby.com and YouBeMom.com. Both are sites devoted to mostly upscale urban parenting concerns, and get thousands of posts per day. Urbanbaby is known for endless debates over the particulars of private schooling, furious arguments over dietary choices, and McGwire-size doses of Upper East Side entitlement; the latter group peeled off the former a couple of years ago and is, if anything, a little more keyed-up. (Maybe some of you can tell the difference between the two sites’ voices. I can’t.)

Many, many Urbanbaby posts trend along the lines of “My toddler was given Gogurt at school today! With high-fructose corn syrup! What are they THINKING?!” There’s also a lot of twaddle about the fine points of private-school admissions. All at once, it is a remarkably close community, a mirror held up to the more ridiculous aspects of well-off urban life, and annoying as hell. In among all that prissiness and locavore neo-Calvinism, though, there is useful advice shared, and a sense that some sane people are lurking among the nightmarish ones. Tonight, for example, I spotted this post, a sympathetic response to a parent’s dejected note that her little boy had bonked his face for the first time and given himself a fat lip. (For reference, “DB” means “darling baby,” and “DH” is “darling husband,” the customary and annoying abbreviations used on these sites.) And I can’t tell you how nice it was to see this, in among all the obsessions of the wealthy:

I FLUNG db over my shoulder at 3 weeks. DH passed her to me and I took her a little too enthusiastically. She sailed over my shoulder and bounced on the bed HARD!

I can’t stop giggling at this, especially because the kid’s fine (I assume; otherwise the mom would never have posted this). It’s straight out of a Chevy Chase movie.