Happy Mother's Day.

Our gift to you today is the launch of www.HawaiiMoms.com, a new Advertiser Web site that we hope will allow you to connect with other moms in Hawai'i and trade information about everything from toilet training to teenage rebellion.

We're not the first to come up with the idea. Gannett Co. has already launched 16 such sites and 12 more are planned. The sites have drawn tremendous traffic, and there is every reason to believe we'll be just as successful.

But we'll give our site many local tweaks. For example, we have a local advisory board letting us know what they like about the site and how it can be improved. We have two local doctors who have agreed to answer your questions. We even have nine discussion leaders — moms who will get the ball rolling with topics of interest.

The mission statement is simple: To be Hawai'i's No. 1 destination for mom-to-mom networking and authoritative information on raising Island children.

Our target audience is all moms between 21 and 44, but moms younger and older will enjoy what we have to offer as well. We know that our market contains 223,234 women with children and that half of them work full time, 19 percent work part time and 31 percent do not work. Clearly www.HawaiiMoms.com can help them learn a few things from one another.

We will provide discussion boards, an events calendar, live blog chats, Treena Shapiro's Family Tree blog, an Ask the Experts feature, reader-submitted photos, parenting stories, columns and other resources. To join the discussion, we have instructions for registering on our site.

Two Advertiser staffers — one a veteran and one a relative newcomer but both moms who were born and raised here — are making this all happen. And they are uniquely qualified to do so.

Esme Infante Nii, who has worked as an editor and reporter at The Advertiser for nearly 18 years, and Diane Seo, who joined The Advertiser last November, are running www.HawaiiMoms.com under the oversight of Sandee Oshiro, our managing editor for digital and multimedia and mother of a 19-year-old daughter.

All three agree that this is a resource that they would have used had it been available when they first had children.

"After I had my baby, there were times I felt isolated because I didn't have a large network of other moms to connect with," said Seo, who has a 21-month-old daughter.

"I think there is a great need for an online resource to link local moms together because we're all trying to take care of our children the best way we can and can learn a lot from each other."

Nii, with a daughter who will be 5 in July and a son who is 2 1/2, says such a site is sorely needed in Hawai'i.

"I sure could have used something like this back when I was a really brand-new mom full of anxieties and questions," she said.

"I hope www.HawaiiMoms.com will help mothers discover that we all have many experiences and concerns in common, and encourage them to share their wisdom with each other."

Nii and Seo selected the discussion topics and features (including Mom of the Week) while talking in focus groups to dozens of moms, including an in-house presentation with Advertiser employees to launch the project and solicit ideas. The idea was to keep the site as local as possible.

"You'll see that reflected, for instance, in some of topics we've selected for the discussion forum — 'hanai' and 'military' and 'grandparents,' for example, because these are some of the topics close to Hawai'i women's hearts," Nii said. "Some of the features proposed by the moms we talked to will be introduced at launch and others may be added in the future."

We are hoping that several thousand users will register for the site by fall. Nii, Seo, Oshiro and others from The Advertiser (including me) will have a booth at the New Baby Expo 2007 this coming Saturday and Sunday at the Blaisdell Exhibition Hall to talk about www.HawaiiMoms.com, and we hope to see you there.

"We hope the site becomes so well known to local moms that it's the first place they go to when they want advice or recommendations about anything to do with raising children," Seo said.

Nii hopes the site will become the go-to location for busy mothers who find our site essential to getting through the day.

"I'll consider www.HawaiiMoms.com successful when I see women on the discussion boards sharing their stories heart-to-heart, making new friends, pooling their knowledge to teach and strengthen other moms, setting up playgroups and childcare and exercise clubs in their neighborhoods, helping each other through difficult issues," she said.

Please go to www.HawaiiMoms.com and enjoy this new site. We are eager to know what you think.