Ten Out of Ten Babies Prefer Breastmilk

So Benj forwarded me this today.

AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!

I hate people. And I especially hate mothers who make crappy choices. And I really especially hate it when people then blame those choices on everyone but themselves. And I loathe people who feel the need to get all offended and defend their right to make those shitty choices.

Breastfeeding is by far the best source of food that your baby can have.

In fact, do you know what the World Health Organisation's baby-food preference matrix is?

1 - Breastfed by the baby's mother
2 - The mother's milk by other means (eg. expressed & bottle fed)
3 - Another mother's milk by any means
4 - Artificial (formula) milk

That's pretty clear to me.

That in mind, everything I'm about to say is fact. It's not opinion or conjecture or an interpretation of the truth. It's just the plain, simple facts.

* If you choose to have a child*, you then choose to breastfeed that child. Deciding not to for your own fucking convenience is like choosing to have a child but then deciding not to give birth to it, opting instead to have it cut out of your body. Hang on, that already happens! No wonder people don't realise what choosing motherhood actually entails.

* NEWFLASH! BREASTFEEDING HURTS! For the first couple of days, weeks sometimes, it's incredibly painful. Cracked & bleeding nipples, afterpain contractions, it's no picnic. But then you & baby both get used to it, and it stops hurting. So to all those women who 'tried' to feed but couldn't stand the pain - shut the fuck up.

* "My baby wasn't gaining enough weight..." Okay, this pisses me off so much I can hardly think straight. This is a double gripe, actually. First up, if you're trying to get your infant onto a routine, then you're a moron. This will decrease your milk supply, therefore leading to a baby who doesn't gain weight. You know what, even if your baby's bottlefed, you shouldn't be using a routine you psycho control freak. And if healthy breastfed babies are being forced onto formula because they fail to meet some arbitrary standard for weight gain, then isn't that just a pretty convincing reason to stop the routine weighing of healthy infants?

* Formula will never, ever be as good as breastmilk. If you're the kind of moronic slag who believes that it's actually better than breastmilk because it has 'added vitamins', then you deserve to be punched in your big empty head.

* Breastfeeding is infinitely more convenient than bottle feeding. Yes, the mother has to be there each time, but you know what? She CHOSE* to take on that role, and breastfeeding's just what mothers do. There's no sterilising, boiling, measuring, heating or cooling. When my baby looks hungry (and he never gets round to crying because he never has to wait that long) I just open my bra & let him latch on. And I don't buy that breastfeeding mothers lose too much sleep. When my baby feeds at night I hardly even wake because he actually sleeps right next to me in my bed where he belongs, not off in some other room down the other end of the house.

* Teeth do not mean you have to wean. Some fuck-knob in the comments of that article claimed that mammals wean when their young start teething. Almost. Actually, primates studied tend to wean when their young have their first permanent molars. That's the human equivalent of 5 - 6 years old.

* Breastfeeding an older child is not weird. If babies are left to wean themselves, that usually happens between 3 & 7 years of age, mostly around 3 or 4. Why would they continue to do it if there was no value to them? The health benefits continue for as long as the milk is produced. And if random strangers have issues with toddlers breastfeeding, that's their own fucking problem. They have no persuasive argument against it other than that, in their cultural opinion, it's gross.

* And don't even get me started on the people that think breastfeeding at any age is disgusting. What the fuck?! I'm pretty sure that these people have drunk milk at some point in their lives. Guess what? IT COMES FROM A COW'S TITS! Gross, hey? Guess you'd better boycott all those dairy products. I understand that there are emotionally retarded men out there who see breasts purely as their own sexual playthings, which is why they feel this way, but it just makes me sad when women go on about how much they hate it.

* I know that hospitals suck at encouraging you to breastfeed. I was unfortunate enough to have to give birth in a hospital, and I was shocked at the blase manner in which they discussed feeding. They seemed to have no preference and saw nothing strange in perfectly health women choosing to formula feed from birth. I, however, had actually been arsed to make myself informed about pregnancy, birth, babies, etc., so knew without doubt that I'd be breastfeeding. Yes, it hurt. No, I didn't really know what to do. I worked it out and I kept going all by myself. And if you need outside help, the Breastfeeding Association offers free counselling & advice. From what I understand, a lot of women find breastfeeding difficult initially but, assuming they don't want to immediately relegate themselves to the scrapheap of worthless mothers, there's plenty of help out there.

* I refuse to make any disclaimers about women who wanted to feed but couldn't. As I've said, I don't believe that most of those women truly couldn't feed. It was just very difficult. And for those who truly couldn't feed, they won't have anything to feel guilty about, and so won't take offence at any of this. I maintain that anyone who does get upset knows that they made a shitful decision and is looking to put that guilt they're feeling onto somebody else.

* If you can't give your baby breastmilk because you're going back to work & are to lazy to express your milk, then perhaps you should have thought about the fact that you can't afford to have a baby before you got pregnant*, you impoverished skank.

* If you think formula feeding is better because then the mother can drink/go out without her baby/wear a fucking see-through top, or so that the daddy can give the little baby a bottle, then grow the fuck up.



Oh, I'm sure there's more, but it's late and I should really be off to bed. Plus I've managed to get myself ridiculously angry. You know, I think what pisses me off the most is the whole 'ooh, you should be nice to women who can't breastfeed, because they didn't know/didn't get help and they're already feeling bad about it'.

Good! They deserve to be feeling bad about it.

If women aren't prepared to actually raise their baby how that child deserves to be raised, they should feel guilty. If women don't have the brains to read up or ask around about things that are relevant to mothers, then they should feel worthless. If women don't have the fucking strength of character to perservere in the face of pain, crappy advice, disapproval, fatigue or postnatal hormones, then they deserve to feel that they've failed their child.

Breastfeeding isn't a choice, it's just what mothers do.


* And don't give me any shit about not having any choice about having a baby. That's what abortion is for, fucktard.

Sweet Dreams

Yeah, I missed yesterday's entry. In my defence, I was sitting on the couch with Atti snuggled up to one side, and Benj lying across my lap. Then when I woke Benj up and got him to move, I fell asleep.

All was good until about 3am when Atti woke me up looking for some Num. So I'm lying there with him lying on top of me, when I realise that the TV is showing some programme about entity attacks. In the light of day I might have found it kind of amusing, or even been interested in it. Also, in the light of day, I would've been able to just turn it over. But instead I was stuck in the dark, flat on my back, a small person firmly attached to me. And I got scared. I was terrified to turn and look at the TV. In fact I was terrified to turn at all, in case some evil old hag was waiting to fuck me up.

When they started playing what they claimed were voice recordings of a man while an attack was happening, I had to shout to get Benj to turn it off for me. So now I have another thing to be scared of. That along with malicious aliens*, the Movie-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, the invisible people who amuse Atti so and seem to be standing just behind me, and Gunther von Hagens.

* Don't wish to bloviate, but I once told Benj of my fear of opening the toilet door after flushing, in case there was an alien standing there waiting for me. In order to allay my fear, my lovely husband just said, "Don't be silly. If an alien wanted to get you, and you were on the toilet, he'd just open the door and come in." Fucker.

Chim Chim Cheree

So I saw an advert on TV for Blood Diamond. Ages ago I saw the trailer while we were at the movies and had decided not to go watch it, seeing as it looked like a big pile of crap. After seeing the TV ad & looking into it further through my friend YouTube, the big pile of crap opinion has been strongly reinforced. But I've also decided that I'll probably want to see it.

Yup, I'm willing to sit through 2 hours of excruciating, nonsensical bullshit just so I can watch as Leonardo DiCaprio joins the ranks of actors who have tried (and failed) to produce a credible South African accent.



Although, to be fair to Leo, he's nowhere near as bad as Nicole Kidman was in The Interpreter. When I watched that movie, I had no idea what the story was about, so spent the first 20 minutes thinking Nicole was trying to sound like she was from Italy, not Zimbabwe. (Sorry, I mean Matobo, that completely made up African country that bears no resemblance to Zimbabwe at all, just as its despised tyrannical leader, who totally gets pwned by Nicole, is in no way similar to Mugabe).



Forgive me while I bloviate, but I think that the worst thing about watching such linguistic cockery is that you can just tell that the actor in question thinks that they're doing Just Fine.

I understand that some people just don't have an ear for accents. I live with one. So I get why people are spewing mangled bollocks all over movie sets. What I don't get, however, is why nobody else tells them how bad they are. Don't these people have dialect coaches? And don't these dialect coaches ever say, "Sorry, Nic, you're just shite. There's nothing I can do for you'? Failing that, how come the directors, camera crew, cast members, editors and catering staff apparently never feel that they're able to speak up and tell the star it's just not working?

But no, instead of being gently corrected (which could, in fact, improve their acting abilities), actors all over the world are left marvelling at their own leet accent skillz.

I hate bad accents. I hate, hate, hate them. I'm of the belief that, if a certain actor can't produce one to a reasonably realistic standard, then the director should either a) get a different actor in to play that part, or b) tell the actor not to bother with the accent at all.*

And this applies to even good actors. Those who are at least adequately skilled in other areas of performance aren't necessarily also able to put on a convincing accent. Allow me to demonstrate:

I actually wanted to put two other people in that list, but I couldn't think of anything postive to say about them.

An annoying Dick playing an irritating mockney wanker.

What the fuck? I mean, seriously, What. The. Fuck?

Intensely bad Australian accents abound on Lost, but Emilie de Ravin is deserving of unbridled scorn because she is actually an Australian. She's from fucking Mount Eliza.

I think I'm either going to start a charity to provide dialect coaches to needy thespians, or lobby for legislation banning dodgy accents. I'd be doing the world a favour.

*Or c) indulge your actor, then post-production get in another actor to dub over the first's monumentally terrible dialogue.

In Which Samantha Is Pissed Off

This is such fucking bullshit. Fate has decreed that not only is it going to piss me off, but it's then going to rub coarse salty salt into my gaping axe-wound. Fuck you fate. And fuck you Shane.

Last year, when Benj and I were moving up here, it happened that we'd be passing by Sydney on the same day that Muse was playing there. Muse being on my (rather short) list of bands I'd really, really like to see live, I wanted to go. But we'd decided to drive up to Lismore the inland route, so it turned out we wouldn't be spending the night in Sydney. And we probably couldn't really afford it at that time. And it turned out for the best because I was actually in the early stages of incubating The Tadpole.

So, I recently find out that Muse is touring again. Brisbane being only a 3 hour drive, I quickly envisaged a lovely night out followed by a sleep in a lovely hotel, followed by a lovely visit to Ikea. But no. Apparently, even though the other shows are all-ages events, the Brisbane one is not. But it's not 18+, either. It's open only to people above the age of 6. Yep, six years old.

What the fuck? When is 6 ever an arbitrary cut-off for anything else? Other than, perhaps, school attendance. And, thinking about it, probably for the free tickets to events that you get as an infant. Is that it, I wonder? Perhaps the Brisbane venue allows children under 6 free admission and Muse are a big fat bunch of tight cuntwads. Who knows?

All I know is that I don't get to see Muse again. But Shane does. Shane, a man who (I have on very good authority) wore a dress to Kryal Castle recently. A man who, I'm sure, will very much enjoy the Musey goodness and come back to bloviate about how great the experience was. Shane, I hope that the acoustics are terrible, you get stuck next to drunken bogans with some kind of plastic trumpet, and when you go to the bathroom a huge, tattooed Maori man called Crusher pisses on your shoes.

The Challenge

So Benj and I are sad, lame bastards. To save me from the need to bloviate, the summary is here. Get set to read a whole lot of crap.

It's supposed to be an entry each every day, but I've been let off the hook for yesterday due to a particularly needy little boy. That said, I have to make up for it today by posting two entries.

In a completely unrelated note, today I heard the following: "Uranus is a giant gas planet." I would've made a great teenaged boy.

Ten Points from Gryffindor

Last December I cut my hair.

I've done this quite a few times before and it usually works out okay. But this time I decided to cut a fringe.

It sucked balls.

So I cut it shorter.

If balls had balls, the shorter fringe would have sucked those balls' balls.

Fast forward to August, almost a full 8 months later, and my fringe has almost grown long enough to be tucked fully behind my ears. Almost. For the sake of my sanity, I decided something had to be done. So I cut my hair shorter and dyed it black.

Without the poxy growing-out fringe this would look fine.

With the poxy growing-out fringe?

Just call me Severus.

What a Wonderful World

You know what I love about babies? The fact that absolutely everything in the world is brand new, exotic & exciting. They're thrilled at every piece of mundane crap they come across. Atticus is no exception.

"Holy fuck! A chair!"

Anyway, it seems the most amazing thing in the whole wide world that this little boy has ever experienced is pooping. It's confusing, it's disconcerting, it's humorous. It also seems to require a lot of effort.

This is Atti in the initial pooping stage. Note the blurred effect due to vigorous head shaking.

"Get out, vile poop!"

And finally the pooping afterglow.

I love this child.