On public discourse of breastfeeding...

It's been some years since the birth of my first child, and I'm still astounded at the never-ending war over breastfeeding. Indeed I'm almost rather taken aback by how prejudicial the public discourse has become, as if no common ground (as if new mothers need one) can be found.

We all know about benefits of breastfeeding, it's:

• Faster
  There's no need to clean the pumping gear, or wash baby bottles. For 15-20 minutes of feeding time, you could be looking at at least twice that long (probably even more when you're expressing breast milk for later) taking care of all the preparation work for other alternatives (pumping, feeding, washing up, freezing/defrozing).
• Cheaper
  Lactating mothers are eating anyways, and baby formula can be expensive. As babies go past six months and are growing fast, you can burn through a box of baby formula in no time.
• Easier
  You don't need to bring pumping gear with you, and as long as the baby is with the mother, the milk spigot is always available and on, 24x7.
• Health benefitsIt's most natural way to feed your baby that Mother Nature has provided us for, with the most assured way to build up the immune system for the baby. Whatever immunity the mother has, it'll be passed onto the baby.
• Natural
  Breast milk provides all the nutrients and fluids, in the most perfect mix, to the baby

Most women, given the choice and circumstances, will probably opt for breastfeeding. But one should not jump too quickly to conclusion for those who can't or won't. How about these:

• There are many working mothers whose workplace does not provide for the space or allow for the time for pumping breast milk. 
• There are those too who cannot afford to not working for a living, to put food on the table for the family. Even if they want to breastfeed, it will simply be impractical to do so.
• There are those whose babies simply can't latch on. Yep, that's me, right there. I tried with my firstborn, and my second child, but no luck. For those who latch on naturally or those who have never had their nipples chewed, they would NEVER know the pain or how hard it can be for some mothers. 
• And then there are those mothers who have health issues that are unable to feed their own babies, or simply don't produce enough milk. It's not a matter of choice, but more a survival (for the baby). 

The lists go on. For me, as a matter of practicality, my attitude is whatever it takes. That means, pumping breast milk from my fast dwindling supply, that means preserving the precious breast milk by mixing breast milk with formulating, that means training my babies to take cold bottles from the fridge, and to put it back if the bottle was not finished.

Yes yes, I've heard enough tsk tsk from others, including my own mother, chastising me for feeding cold bottles to my babies. But I'm blessed with an open-minded husband who helps with all fronts. (He's approached the feeding of babies from all scientific angle, including the search for the "perfect" sized nipple for the bottle in order to reduce air sucked in by the baby during feeding which help in burping the babies afterward.) I'm forever grateful too, to have a pediatrician who is as open-minded as my husband. Perhaps his acknowledgement that babies at two months old should be able to regulate their own body temperature, was among the first sigh of relief that cold bottles are just fine for babies. (For those who care to learn about this, both of my babies only showed me their cringe of face in a flash second when they first tasted cold milk, but neither of us ever looked back. To this day, both my kids drink everything cold, and they're fit as a fiddle.)

You know what, in the end, everything is well and good. Both my babies turn out fine (even with cold bottles of 50/50 breast milk and formula since they were two months old). My husband would tell you too, that he and his brother were both formula babies, and they turn out just fine too (Ivy League'd). One of my sisters breastfeed her two kids till past three years old, but they have the usual usual kids' ailments (ear infection, asthma, fever, the works) from time to time, even more so than my kids.

My mother's generations, decades ago, all breastfed their babies, of course. It's a matter of necessity. Almost all women were stay-home moms, and breastfeeding was "part of the job." I and my siblings all grew up on breast milk. I never even had a low-grade fever when growing up, while one of my sisters would have fever often.

What does this all tell us?

I'd say, breast milk is great, if you can do it. If you can't or won't, that's not the end of the world. For chrissake, there are so many more good things that you can do for your kids through their lifetime than just breast milk. I won't get too hung up on that.

To those passive-aggressive, or outright aggressive-aggressive, sets who insist on their own brand of parenting to be THE best way to go, I'd say, just fuck off.  Most mothers (maybe with the exception of a small numbers of them who shouldn't even have kids in the first place) have the best interests of the babies in mind. It's hard enough to be a new mother, and they don't need someone else to lecture them every step of the way. This is exactly the same type of meddling into someone else's affairs that the religious set does to the women's reproductive rights and abortion rights.

More often than not, public discourse on breastfeeding is simply the passive-aggressive way for some women (I won't even bother to acknowledge men in such conversation) to brag about how they know more than other women, how they are better mothers than other women, how they should be the standard-bearers and not other women. To those, I'd gladly say too, to just fuck off.

On the demise of the iBeacon fad...

I don't know if there are that many people who remember the splash announcement of iBeacon from Apple couple of years ago, but I highly suspect if anyone outside of the industry would remember or care. It thus comes as no surprise - almost to be expected - on the news that, two years later, iBeacon hardly catches on which sounds like an obituary in advance.

For something coming from Apple, it must have doubled the disappointment. The iPhone users are a much more coveted crowd, they generally have higher spending power, they are more loyal (to their phone and Apple), they tend to embrace newer trend (afterall, having a popular app on the Apple Store is every developer's wet dream). Startups and retailers must have expected iBeacon to deliver the nirvana that they're been looking for, tracking users every step of the way, aisle by aisle, pushing coupons, news and more to them, staying in "constant contact" with them. Perfect, right?

Yes, it's perfect, to advertisers and retailers. To users and consumers, it's beyond creepy, one more step toward Minority Report.

No one wants to admit it either, but the whole online coupon fad has fully played out, as evident by the spectacular rise and fall of Groupon, falling to only 1/10th of its IPO value in three year's time.

Maybe no one wants to admit it, but everyone should be fully aware that the younger generations, the crowds that retailers most wanted, coming of age in the Edward Snowden exposé, and being much more tech savvy than their parents and grandparents, are much more cognizant of privacy concerns. While they might put themselves out there, in the age of Instagram, that's not the same as being tracked for every step one makes.

I never bought into the Groupon craze, I have better things to do with my time. Turning off bluetooth was among the first thing I did when I got my iPhone, and I never intend to turn it back on, for the sake of some iBeacon that I fully do not intend to use (or be tracked). I hate finding anything about myself online because I take privacy every seriously, and I mean to keep it that way. To that end, I'm not sorry to see the demise of iBeacon, and for good measure.

On disputes between condo owners and trustee/management...

I recently sold a condo where we've lived for the past ten odd years. Reasons are many-fold. We need more space for the kids, the price is good in this seller's market, and it's high time to cash out. Although I could easily hold onto the property and rent it out with very decent return yield, I'm just getting very tired of it all.

And so, when I read the New York Times story of the online entanglement and dispute between owners/residents and building board/management, I can totally relate to it.

In a building where more than half of the owners were absentee landlords, plus a majority owner who owns more than 40% of the units in the building, it's almost impossible to organize any meaningful challenge to upset the status quo because the existing trustees on the board were pretty much shoo-in, given the blessing of this one majority owner.

Things were not all that bad in the beginning, and no one bothered too much of anything, so long as snow is shoveled, garbage is collected on time. So everyone continued to pay the relatively high management fee, even though there wasn't much ongoing maintenance that the building should need to pay on a monthly basis. Given all the high management fees that we all paid into it, the condo association has almost no reserve, which did raise legitimate concerns as to where the money went. The budget was discussed in annual meetings, but owners were not given how much were actually spent and where it's spent, so it's impossible to discern if the budget is a good or necessary budget, or not. When questions were asked, the canned answer was always "we'll get back to you" but it never came, so that in a few months' time, no one would remember what questions needed to be answered.

It's only when a new owner started moving in, and she had more time on her hand, that she started looking and asking questions and gradually more owners (who lived in the building) started to come to. We started attending the owners' annual meetings. When reasonable questions were asked, trustees and condo managers tried either dismissed the questions as frivolous or unnecessary, with not so much as a "trust me on this" attitude to dismiss them all. Naturally that didn't go down so well.

Owners started organizing, tried the proper way to unseat the board, to no avail (thanks largely to the majority owner). Owners asked for details, and the condo management company's tactics were to nickel-and-dime every single request with high service charge to make us go away.

Owners, one by one, got tired of all these infighting. When the price is right, one activist owner after another sells. Eventually even this majority owner sold the stake in one block to another individual. After more than ten years, I got tired of it all as well, and I sold as well. The price is good, the time is right, and the new owners can fight their fight, but that will not be me.

Looking back, I wonder if it would have helped, had the owners had online tools and forums for organizing the efforts. With online forums going out to larger public, would it have added more urgency or necessity for the trustees/board to take the activist owners more seriously? It's naturally impossible to ascertain this kind of what-if.

I do learn one thing from this epic saga.

I've decided that I would not buy any condo (worse yet, co-op) in the future. I would only opt for freehold properties that I can make all the decisions. I'll be my own condo manager and trustee. I'll handle my own finances. I don't want to deal with this kind of messy infighting that I can't affect the outcome anymore.