Lavendar Lass! I am so glad to see this post. I started a post on the kitchen forum asking if anyone had info about you. Hope all is well with you. We miss you in the Kitchen!

Last night someone in the kitchen forum was having the same problem I was having...........I would hit submit and the message would not "submit". Then when I would try again it wound get rejected saying I had already submitted it..............but it was not there! Now after reading your post I wonder if my messages were going to another thread instead of the one intended. Then later, I could not type in the submit box here. The letters would not show up. I thought my keyboard batteries had died. Then I went to another website and tried typing and letters would appear. Why letters would not appear only here at GW was a mystery to me. I never heard of that happening anywhere. Everything else worked fine. It was just the message box that would not accept typing letters.

Actually breastfeeding is a great time saver. No formula to buy, no bottles to wash and prepare. You can do it anywhere and once a mother and baby are in the groove it is easy to multitask. I ate dinner,shopped,cooked and read to my DD while nursing. Plus cuddling your child is the most important job you will ever have. It's funny. My DD were talking just last night about this. She is having some pretty strong pre-labor contractions so we are on the phone a lot. She said "mom I am so looking foward to having this baby and I feel so empowered". "I'm glad I'm breast feeding too cuz I'm feeling too lazy for bottles" LOL I told her I felt the same way when i had her and her brother. Natural childbirth with minimal intervention is keeping it simple and breast feeding is a no brainer IF you ignore the advice of anyone who hasn't done it for at least a year themselves. Now I know a bunch will chime in and say they tried but couldn't. I'll be blunt -- 99%+ of failing to breastfeed are due to poor advice or not going with your own instincts. Many breast fed babies are leaner than formula fed ones. Many lose a bit of weight in the days following birth. Some nurse frequently but for short periods of time and others are titty monsters. LOL It is not like bottle feeding. there is no right schedule other than demand feeding. You cannot see how much the baby is getting so young mothers panic. There is almost always enough milk unless the mother has an underlying health condition. Doctors and pediatricians have mixed advice and are not the best ones to listen to. (unless they themselves have breastfed for a least one year) I was told I couldn't breast feed through mastitis (milk fever), I did thanks to a wonderful book I'd read with real advice from nursing mothers. I was told to give it up when I got torticollis due to the drugs I would have to take. I found a c doctor who offered an alternative treatment with drugs that wouldn't enter my bloodstream and milk. I had a pediatrician who wanted me to stat solids early. I didn't and after several visits of being told by him that DD must be eating very well and to keep adding more, ignoring my telling him she was exclusively on breast milk I dumped him. I threw away the pacifiers (gift) and dumped the formula the hospital sent home with me. Had I used them maybe things wouldn't have worked out as well . Who knows but I wasn't taking any chances of anything coming between me and my ability to breast feed.

Jeannie and Mama, yes, I was poking fun, that's why I put the smileys at the end of the message. Sorry if I was ambiguous. I understand not wanting to make it into a hobby. Then again, there are plenty of things that seem to make people happy and relax, forget their troubles... for one of my neighbors, it's his garden. He just *loves* taking care of it. He also doesn't seem to like to do laundry. Me, I don't much care for gardens. Mine is not worse because I found someone I can pay that comes mow my lawn. No one has to like vacuuming, or cooking, or putting dishes in the dishwasher, or doing laundry. I don't like ironing, for example. I only do it when I have to, which is not often. But for good or bad, I like to do some things -- they relax me and seem to make people happier. I like laundry and vacuuming for example, and I also like to load/unload the dishwasher. Those are tasks that to my mind, have a beginning, an end, and it's pretty hard they'll go bad, usually you end up with less mess, more clean stuff and, unlike my job, I can point to stuff that is physical and exists in the world, other people can see them, and I can say "I ran the dishwasher" or "I did all this laundry" and it's *visible*, it's clean, it's done, everyone is happy. Maybe it's not that way for everyone -- but, for good or bad, I'm a computer geek. When I have a good day at work (it happens often enough), *no one* notices, because everything goes right. When I have a hard day at work, *everyone* notices, because they can't do their jobs if the software or hardware is malfunctioning. And, the vast majority of the times, what I am doing is software, there is *nothing* I can point to that actually exists in the world: it's all just a bunch of bits in random places inside some memory device, like a DVD, a hard drive or a solid state disk. You point to a tiny thing that holds 128 gigabytes but you can't point to the *exact* location the software is in, and there are *tons* of other things there in addition to the software or data that I put in or am responsible for. I shouldn't complain, it's a good life, on one hand it's easier than farming things or building things etc, on the other hand it's harder than herding cats, or so I'm told, I've never actually herded cats. But I hope you can understand why I'm kinda protective of my "hobbies": when I first asked if people in my home minded if I did those, *everyone* said no and backed 3 steps to make sure they were not volunteering for the tasks. I took over them, I like them, I do them very well. *Now* that some people want to share the tasks or take over them, I'm saying no. They are mine! Bwahahahah!!!! ;-) Cheers, -- Paulo.