I'm back at work now, and the "breastfeeding" continues - i'm pumping the boobies 3 times a day, including all the sterilizing everything in the work kitchen. This has resulted in many conversations in the kitchen, with various working fathers and mothers, on the political world of formula versus breastmilk, and some awful first hand stories of how ashamed they were of not doing 100% breastmilk.

I think it would be good to have more public statements from mothers who did less than 100% breastmilk - you do the best you can, and formula is not the evil some people think it is.

Some people can't, because of milk supply, or they have to work to pay the rent, and I'd like to see more support of those that don't achieve 100% breastfeeding.

If you post a question or statement online (like this blog post) on formula you attract comments/replies, including some reasonable and helpful ones, but also including the "you can tell my kids are breastfed because they didn't die from cot death" statements, and other loveliness. Being a new parent is full of worry, so these eat away at anyone's confidence and selfworth.

We've chosen to do as much breastmilk as possible, but there's a choice we've made to use formula. There are government funded campaigns to ensure that any mother who does that feels as much guilt as can be instilled via national advert campaign on multiple media.

Mike discovers there's a new CHEESE SHOP in Petone

Pamela the midwife has a blog post of thoughts and info on teenage pregnancy in New Zealand.

Mark Osbourne mentions Uruguay gave a laptop to every single child.

Vampire wannabies can buy bags of tasty blood fit for human consumption.

There's a Save Maranui fundraiser involving speedos.

Open office is spreading quickly all over Belgium according to The Open Source Observatory and Repository for European public administrations.

Someone invented a Robot that loads and unloads the dishwasher

Rachel Alpine talks about need for plain language and official information

Live scribe, the makers of that shiny gadget pen i use alot are opening an app store of applications that run on the pen.

time to announce on my blog, that... ta da... i'm pregnant.

let the "congratulations" comments ensue (it's traditional)

It's a strange world i've found myself in -- in New Zealand everything is free in the whole pregnancy and birth stuff.. except it's overloaded and thus unavailable. free, but you can't have any.

Midwives are free - isn't that awesome?? except that they're all booked up, none available. I can hire an obstetrician, but, guess what, they're all booked out too.

Antenatal classes are free -- but they're all full. (and curiously: contact is via a hotmail address)

The GP should have been free, but my GP choose not to enroll onto the system, so it wasn't free. The nurse mentioned this was because the amount they get re-embursed dosen't make it worth it.. so FREE! but not available.

I have since changed GP, less convenient but free (except for the taxi ride). However, GPs won't do antenatal care like a midwife does -- I'm guessing this is because there's not enough money in it due to government setting the price.

Parts of the medical world runs like the 19th century. To get the list of midwives to ring (i rang them all) you need to ring a phone number run by ministry of health, then talk to a human, who snail mails you their "database" I asked if they had a website, but was told "no, nothing fancy like that". I asked if they could email it to me instead "no, we're not allowed to use email at work". - I almost expected it to turn up on horseback. or a morse code telegram. Might have been faster than waiting 4 days for mail.