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Eleven years ago, Erma Bombeck did something she'd never done before: She wrote a blurb for a little baby book.

Actually, it was a book for middle-age babies -- baby boomers who were facing 50 -- and Ms. Bombeck loved its wit and humor.

Thanks to her endorsement -- she called the "Middle Aged Baby Book" a "perfect" book for that age group "and those in denial" -- it sold a quarter of a million copies.

Its author, Mary Lou Weisman of Westport, Conn., doesn't expect the same thing to happen again, but because the first version was written pre-Google, pre-BlackBerry, it was time for an update

Hence, "My Baby Boomer Baby Book, A Record of Milestones, Millstones and Gallstones," (Workman Publishing, $13.95) which delivers some serious belly laughs in satirizing the self-absorption, self-entitlement and inexorable physical decline of this particular generation as it heads toward ... well, you know.

The book, which is padded, water-resistant (!) and brightly illustrated, has an obsessively detailed format -- "First Words" "I Can Read" and "Am I Smiling... (or is it gas?) " that will be immediately recognizable to those same baby boomers, who, 20 years ago, greeted their first children with the manic single-mindedness and record-keeping normally associated with high school science projects.

"This is a book about narcissism, but it's also meant to be funny," said Ms. Weisman, author of two other books and a longtime freelance writer, commentator for Public Radio International and a creative writing teacher at The New School University in New York City.

Getting old and laughing about it has always been a popular genre for humorists, who are, 99.9 percent of the time, female. There was, of course, Erma Bombeck, who died in 1996. More recently, Nora Ephron has written a best-selling volume of acerbic essays on aging, "I Feel Bad About My Neck," and Carrie Fisher has a new one-woman show "Wishful Drinking" about the ebbs and flows of her own life.

Ms. Weisman, at age 69, is not a boomer but close enough, she says, to accurately document their foibles and their excesses.

Instead of "See How I've Grown," there's "See WHAT I've Grown" (varicose veins and eye flaps). Men are walked through "The Seven Stages of Hair Loss" ("Stage Two: dyes remaining hair mahogany").

In the chapter "My Personality," baby boomers can check off any number of descriptions under the "I am the kind of person who ..."

Carries a water bottle everywhere.

Can't wait for Armegeddon.

Likes speed dating.

An illustration of a "Family Tree" includes a smiling, gray-haired couple and underneath them, the caption: "Marriage held together by Wellbutrin." There are other suggested captions for your own relatives, too: "Found his wife on Craigslist"; "Won't go into assisted living"; "Married a woman half his age"; "Has my brains (and thighs). "

Ms. Weisman isn't always funny. She's written about serious subjects for the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic and The New Yorker. Her first book, documenting her late son Peter's battle with muscular dystrophy, was made into a television movie in the early 1980s.

But even as she describes that experience, she clicks into funny mode again.

"Liza Minnelli played me," she said, noting wryly that for three weeks during the shoot in Canada "we were best friends." The following Christmas, a giant poinsettia tree from Ms. Minnelli was delivered to her doorstep, with a card "that said something like, 'Love ya, love ya, baby.' And when I wet my finger and touched the signature, it smudged, which meant she actually signed the card."

The next year, though, Ms. Weisman got a poinsettia bush and a signature that didn't smudge, and the third year the plant was supermarket-sized, and "after that I didn't get anything, and then I knew she didn't love me anymore. That was my brush with fame, in the form of a signature that would not smear."

Ms. Weisman may not beat out John Grisham, Sen. Barack Obama or Bill O'Reilly this time on the best-seller list, either, but writing the book has been good therapy for her. And she hopes it will ease the angst for baby boomers struggling with hair loss, insomnia and bladder control issues (exhaustively detailed in the "Toilet Training" chapter) not to mention those who remember when: "A cell was for prisoners," "Extraordinary rendition was a compliment," "And 50 wasn't the new anything."

"I'm a serious person who likes to make people laugh," Ms. Weisman said. "My kind of humor is essentially comfort humor. It's a tough time for boomers, and they have my sympathy."