Expressing - tell me how you built up enough milk for a feed

[PickledLily]

I've tried expressing a coup;le of times now but haven't got more than 50ml, despite drinking lots of water and expressing in the morning using a 'full' breast (whilst baby wasn't looking to see me taking her milk ). I struggle to find enough time to express because baby is always feeding or needs holding to stop her screaming :( The good bit is that she is happy feeding from the bottle or from the breast.

So how did you manage to build up enough expressed milk for a feed? Baby is 6 weeks old.

50mls is a good amount to express (you've got that out on top of making all the BM for your baby too) and it can take a mum who is exc. bfing a few times expressing to make up enough for one feed - you'd be looking for around 60-120mls depending on time away from baby and baby's appetite at the time.

Drinking more water won't make you make more milk and in fact drinking excessively over and above what you need can lower the amount of milk available while your body struggles to balance the electrolytes in your blood. Drinking to thirst is best practice for bfing mums.

Kellymom.com has lots of info on expressing here

Try different times of day - do you find you leak at all? I can't get milk out in the afternoons but at 4am it's practically coming out by itself.

Another 50ml would be plenty for a feed - I've found the first times I need about 3 goes at expressing to get a sure feed, then twice should be enough (sometimes once). of course now dd 13 weeks has decided she's not going to drink the stuff...

In terms of storing it, You can freeze the precious 50ml and then add to that frozen milk when you get the next expressed bit.
Tesco sell very good (or they used to!) breast milk freezing bags. I then wrote the date on the bag in freezer pen to keep track of it
I used to have a sense of pride as I saw the little stockpile getting bigger.

We fed DS mostly on expressed breastmilk for months.
The thing that increased the quantity the most was increasing the number of times a day I expressed. I got most milk out first thing in the morning.

NHS guidelines say you can store it for up to 5 days in the fridge (at the back of the fridge), and we would combine milk expressed at different times to make up a full bottle for DS.

I spotted breast milk storage bags on the shelf in Tescos last week, so they're still selling them.

Thanks everyone, i'll start stashing the milk in the freezer and keep at it to try to increase the volume.