I often get asked this, in particular to do with the Nestle boycott.  I’ve also been interestedly reading lots of discussions about the Homeschool Blogger Boycott on various blogs and internet forums (I always think that ought to be ‘fora’ but it sounds too daft for words!).  It appears that many people really don’t understand the reasons for boycotting something.  My reasons are this:

1. It might stop something happening that you disagree with, or at least diminish it a little.

2. It educates people and brings to their attention the presence of something you disagree with, something that they may well disagree with as well.

3. For your own peace of mind - you know you are not lending any support to something you disagree with.

I don’t buy Nestle products because I hope that my little part in the organised boycott might press them to change their unethical marketing practices of breastmilk substitutes (and it has actually worked in the past).  When people ask me why I won’t eat Kitkats, I tell them - sometimes they are horrified and ask me to let me have more information so they can boycott Nestle too; sometimes they don’t believe me, or don’t believe that marketing breastmilk substitutes can have such a dire effect; sometimes they don’t believe boycotts work; sometimes they don’t think they’d be able to boycott such a huge multinational.  I don’t buy Nestle products because I am very unhappy with the idea that they will be using my money to support their unethical practices.

I boycott most unethical clothing companies.  There are no official boycotts of these companies, so it’s unlikely to have much effect on their behaviour but it does allow me to educate others and to ensure that I’m not helping finance their unpleasant behaviour.

Although I don’t have the logo on my blog, I also boycott Homeschool Blogger because I simply don’t want to have anything to do with anything that supports (or even recommends) a practice so abbhorent to me as corporal punishment.  I think it has an effect because so many people are boycotting it.  And it’s educating people - making people aware of the issue.

So that’s the point of boycotting. 

Apologies for the pause in blogging lately.  It’s because I feel simply rubbish and I now remember why I said ‘never again’ when I was this pregnant with Mopsy.  I just don’t do pregnancy very well.  This weekend I also got mastitis which made me feel even worse and I really didn’t know if I was going to be able to get through the next few weeks - I didn’t know how much of the sickness and grottiness was down to the pregnancy and how much to the mastitis and had visions of everything getting worse and worse as time went on.  As it was, I now know most of it was due to the mastitis as, although I still feel horrid, I don’t feel so half-dead as I did!  I’m spending most of each day desperately looking forward to bedtime.  It’s so stupid as I know that the tiredness is my body telling me to slow down and rest but the only way I can cope with the sickness is by keeping busy and trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to take my mind off it!  And I feel desperately guilty that the girls are not having a very devoted or patient mum at the moment - Flopsy has been delegated to the care of the television and Mopsy just gets a lot of “oh, not another dirty nappy!”, “Leave Flopsy alone!”; “Can’t you play on your own?” etc. - poor little thing.  Roll on the 2nd trimester and bags of energy (please, please can this pregnancy follow the same route as my last two?!).  On a lighter note, had the most surprisingly wonderful appointment with the NHS midwife today.  We’re going to find the money somehow for our independent midwife again, but we’ve decided to have a dating scan because…well we’ve weighed it all up and have decided we want to!  DH wants to see the baby at least once, and I want to hear that I’m weeks further on than I think I am :-P  Anyway, it’s a million times less complicated to get a scan directly through the NHS than it is to go to the independent midwife, who then goes to an NHS midwife, who then books the scan, blah blah blah.  Anyway, I’d expected this particular NHS midwife (new to me as we’ve moved surgeries since having Mopsy) to be horrid as she’d told a friend of mine that they’d get social services involved if she insisted on having a homebirth(!!!) but she was actually very lovely indeed.  She’d read up about Flopsy and Mopsy and mentioned them by name to me.  She asked me if I did or didn’t want to have any screening tests at all, and even if I wanted to refuse either or both of the scans.  No pressure either way.  She asked me what I had done as a job before having children.  I told her I was a nurse and she immediately respecting my knowledge and talked to me as a fellow health-care professional.  She asked me ’Do you still do that?” instead of “Do you still work?” which earns big brownie points from me as I hate being asked if I work…as if I spend all day lazing around doing nothing because I don’t get paid!!!  She said that she wouldn’t take it personally at all if I decided to book an independent midwife for the birth again, and said she wished that NHS midwives could offer the same devoted care.  She assured me that the NHS midwifery service would still be there if I ever needed it again.  I’m going to have a booking in appointment with her in a couple of weeks and have decided that I’ll stay NHS until the last couple of months of my pregnancy - my IM knows me already from when I had Mopsy and wouldn’t need to take over until then anyway.  Oh yes, and I came away with the most disgusting amount of leaflets etc. from various advertisers - what a hideous waste of paper :-(  And they give that to every single mum!

Right, I seem to have stopped moaning and started feeling a bit better after that post!  I’ll stop now and try to think of something more interesting to write next time!