Ten months of wondering if all of my efforts were even making a difference. For 10 months I have been a pumping breastfeeding mother, and for 10 months I have struggled with feeling proud of that. But you know what?
For the week that my baby spent in the NICU, I pumped at the hospital when I was still a patient, and later, at the hotel we rented nearby to stay close to her. A lot of my time that week came down to the hour-or-so increments I would rush back to the hotel to shower, pump, and shovel a Chipotle burrito bowl into my mouth as fast as possible before heading back to the hospital with my cooler bag full of milk. When we finally came home from the hospital, I continued setting my alarm for every 3 hours to pump.
My life became an overwhelming blur of trying to nurse my daughter, handing her off to my husband to bottle-feed, then pumping for 20 to 30 minutes, washing and sterilizing all the pump parts, then repeating the process in another hour. Frustration over the endless attempts at getting my daughter to latch. Overwhelming feelings of failure that it was my fault. Guilt that I had essentially created double the work for all of us.
And I felt so terribly alone. I was driven by an intense need to supply my baby with breast milk, but I also felt slightly crazy for what I was putting us all through. I ended up venting to another mom I knew who had difficulty breastfeeding, blubbering my way through an explanation of what each feeding looked like. Her simple matter-of-factness about what I was going through floored me. Do you mean to tell me that there was an actual name for what I was doing?
Like, it was a real thing, and not just me making it up as I went? Somehow, in all of my years of working as an OB nurse, in my near-decade of being a mom, and in my career as a professional parenting writer, I had no idea the EP community existed. Other ways to boost your oxytocin might include listening to music, watching a comedy on TV, reading a book, or browsing social media on your phone. If you are able to cuddle your baby while expressing, you may see an increase in your normal milk output!
It is even possible to express while carrying your baby in a sling or baby carrier. It can feel disheartening if you are watching your collection bottles and feel that they are not filling up quickly enough. Covering the bottles with socks, or distracting yourself so that you are not watching, can be helpful. If you are struggling to get a let-down, it is ok to put your pump away and come back to it minutes later and try again. If it is a persistent problem at certain times of day, try to remember that the stimulation you are giving your breast still has a valuable purpose.
In order to keep pumping comfortable and avoid nipple damage, you may want to consider using lubrication, such as lanolin or olive oil, inside the pump flange to reduce friction. The flange needs to make a comfortable seal around the breast.
Pumps have different suction and cycles settings. You may want to start with a low suction and high number of cycles to stimulate your let-down. Once your milk starts flowing, you can decrease the number of cycles and increase suction. In order to avoid getting sore, it is a good idea not to use the same suction setting for long periods of time. Switching between low and high suction also helps to trigger more let-downs. Once you are done pumping, you can massage both breasts and hand express to make sure your breasts are completely drained.
As breastmilk is highly digestible, breastfed babies tend to feed little and often. When babies nurse directly at the breast, milk intake varies from feeding to feeding, so the amount of breastmilk taken per bottle may also vary throughout the day. On average, babies need ml of breastmilk per day between one and six months of age. You may want to pump slightly more than this to make sure you have enough milk when your baby goes through a grow spurt.
Babies drink from a bottle and nurse from the breast in a completely different way. When drinking from a bottle, babies cannot control the flow of milk, which can be uncomfortable for them and can lead to overfeeding.
In order to minimise this problem, you may want to feed your baby your expressed milk in a way that is as close as possible to nursing. This is often referred to as paced bottle feeding.
Rather than feeding your baby bottles of expressed milk according to a strict schedule, you may want to feed on demand, as you would if they were nursing at the breast, being aware of early hunger cues. Holding your baby upright and keeping the bottle in a horizontal position allows the baby to suck actively, as he would at the breast, and to control the flow of milk, taking a break whenever he needs to.
Offering the bottle teat gently, letting the baby draw it into their mouth, and feeding to satiation also allow the baby to be more in control of his feed.
Shaking breastmilk is also not necessary. If away from home, you could use a cool bag with ice packs. Our page Storing Your Milk has comprehensive details on safe periods for storing expressed milk for healthy babies. If your baby is unwell or premature, then follow hospital guidelines. Your baby will benefit more from fresh than frozen breastmilk because its living properties will help him fight off possible infections, however all human milk is beneficial for you baby.
You may well see that your expressed milk is not always the same colour, and that it separates into layers when it has been stored for a while. Neither of these is a cause for concern, and a gentle swirl of the container before you feed your milk to your baby should make the layers mix again.
If you find that you are producing more milk than your baby needs, you might like to consider donating your milk by registering as a donor for your local breastmilk bank. You could try to reduce the length of your pumping sessions by a few minutes over a few weeks, or you could try slowly increasing the intervals between sessions. By taking on the work of exclusive pumping, though, you gave your baby a wonderful gift. Casemore, S. Gray Lion Publishing, Second edition. The importance of Oxytocin How to pump How much milk to pump Feeding your breastmilk Storing your breastmilk Stopping exclusively pumping Getting Started If you have recently given birth and your mature milk has not yet come in, hand expressing is the most effective way of collecting colostrum to feed to your baby.
Check your pee when you go I know, sounds funny! If it is light yellow to clear, you are plenty hydrated. Make sure you eat! While you are pumping, you will keep the weight off, I promise! It can make you hungry as a horse and it does that for a reason. You need the extra calories because you are burning so much off! Eventually, your hunger should taper off mine has. Eat REAL oatmeal, not the instant.
You can eat the quick oats the ones that cook in 1 minute or the old fashioned oats that cook in 5 minutes. You can also make cookies that have oatmeal in them and get oatmeal that way I prefer this way! No one is sure how the oatmeal works but it does! Get some rest yeah, I know easier said than done! If you are exhausted and have the opportunity to take a nap even if it pushes your pump back do it! You will actually get more milk that way! Conserving energy is important.
This all depends on how you personally handle stress. I tend to be a thinker, so I think things out a lot. Some suggest drinking dark beer, with or without alcohol. Plus some women just swear by the relaxation it gives them! You can have 1 or 2 beers without much crossing into your milk. Note : Most breastfeeding experts do not routinely recommend using alcohol to boost milk supply.
More on alcohol and breastfeeding here. There is a tea called Mothers Milk Tea and it is supposed to increase your supply if you drink it. There are herbs like Fenugreek and also prescription medications that will increase your supply if you really need it. I would use these as a last resort but they can be effective and are available! Most importantly, good pumping habits will keep your supply up and increase it!
This was the best trick I learned!! I went hands free and set my pump up by my computer and read my pumping board while I pump. You can use an old nursing bra and just cut slits in the flap.
Then you just slide the horns through. At 7 times a day, that was a bit much!! The best thing about this bustier is that it can be worn over any nursing bra. You put them in a ziplock bag or not, this is optional , and put them in the refrigerator.
Many of us started out using the Gerber Seal-N-Go bag but they get very pricey quickly. After researching it online, I found many other women were using regular freezer bags for freezing the milk…. MUCH cheaper! From what I have found, I only buy Glad and not Ziploc. Ziploc seems to have a much higher rate of leaks. I write the date and amount of ounces on the label with a sharpie and put the milk in and freeze flat. I then take several of them and put them into a gallon size freezer bag and write the dates that are enclosed on the gallon bag.
This helps by double bagging and keeping them grouped. Also, whenever I want to get a bag, I can just dig through gallon size bags instead of tons of little bags floating around! It is perfectly safe to put the lansinoh on before pumping and still use the milk. Putting it on before and after pumping really helps to keep you from getting too sore.
Purelan is also good and cheaper. You can also rub Olive Oil on the horns and inside the nipple chamber to reduce friction. Olive Oil is antibacterial so it is helpful. This is also safe to use and pump milk with. There are times when I seem to get sorer than other times with no real explanation.
But, it then goes away as quickly as it came!
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