BREASTFEEDING could never be described as a waste of time, but it does leave you with a lot of time on your hands.

You can end up sitting for hours a day, pinned under the weight of a rapidly expanding baby with more suction power than your average Dyson.

You can't move, unless you actually want to do the washing up with an infant dangling from your boob like a fluffy pink sink plunger, and your range of motion is severely limited, so even something as relatively unathletic as typing is just too much like hard work.

So what exactly are you supposed to do with all this extra bum-on-sofa time?

You could put your feet up, close your eyes and simply enjoy doing nothing for half an hour or so. In fact, this is probably the wisest option of all as you are unlikely to have half an hour to yourself again for at least the next 18 years once the baby starts asserting itself and stops sleeping like a cat in a coma (if I remember rightly from when Munchkin Major was a baby, they usually decide that sleeping is for wimps at about three weeks old).

But after a week or two, doing nothing becomes a chore in itself. So what other choices are available?

You could follow your midwife's advice and spend every spare minute of your day doing stomach squeezes and pelvic crunches so you don't spend the rest of your life wetting your knickers every time you sneeze, laugh, cough or reach for a jar of pickled beets on the top shelf of the condiments aisle at Tesco.

Now we all know that these exercises are essential, but there are only so many crunches and squeezes you can do before your nether regions stop being toned and start looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger on a bad hair day.

I reckon 30 to 50 crunches a day is about my limit. After that I start to twitch and grimace like a constipated rodent.

If sitting with your feet up or squeezing your pelvic floor are not for you, how about following the example of one of my close chums and writing a book while breastfeeding. She spent hours scribbling away with a notebook and pen to her right and a particularly peckish baby to her left.

I can only assume that this meant she had one unused, deflated little breast and one of Dolly Partonesque proportions, but I was so full of awe and admiration of her discipline and determination in writing a book while breastfeeding a newborn that I completely forgot to kop a feel to find out for sure.

While pregnant with Munchkin Minor, I had lots of big ideas about what I was going to do with my breastfeeding bum-on-sofa time. Maybe I could write a book I thought, or learn a language or do a correspondence course in something fascinating but completely useless like Mongolian basket weaving or algebra.

But now little Miss M is actually here and has me pinned to the sofa for 40 minutes or so every couple of hours, my high falutin' ideas have taken flight and I have opted for something distinctly low falutin' instead - daytime telly.

I knew it was bad, but I didn't realise just how addictive its sheer awfulness was until now. Once you start watching really terrible telly, you can't stop. It's like sniffing sour milk to see if it's gone off: you just have to keep going back to make sure.

So now if you pop round to mine for a morning cuppa (don't bother unless you come bearing chocolate Hobnobs) you are likely to find me glued to the Big Strong Boys on BBC1 (if only!) or enjoying a riveting phone-in entitled 'Do you believe in fairies?' (honestly, I didn't make that up) on This Morning with Fern and Phil.

It's sad, isn't it? A grown woman unable to switch off the telly for fear of missing a vital piece of information about chipboard or fairies.

My only hope now of ever conquering this addiction lies with the baby. I'm praying that one day soon all this breastfeeding will give her sufficient strength to make a lunge for the remote control.

With my luck though, she'll just switch over to Five and all hope will be lost for ever.

Updated: 09:50 Tuesday, May 06, 2003