Expressing milk - advice?

[Hayls]

Hi. My dd is 8 weeks old and has been exclusively breast fed since birth, which both of us really enjoys. She is still feeding often- around every 2 hours during the day and 1 or 2 feeds at night and i'm now thinking about expressing some milk so that dh can give her the odd feed. I've bought the Avent breast pump but would love some advice and tips as I know nothing about it and haven't 'bonded' very well with my hv. When is the best time to express and how much is she likely to need? Any other shared experience would be much appreciated!
TIA

If you look down the thread list under B & B feeding , you'll find loads of previous threads on this.

Hi hayls

My dd2 is 12 weeks old, and has been bf since birth too.

I've never really got on with breastpumps much -- at the risk of sounding a bit earthy, I find I can express by hand just as easily.

There's no ideal time of day to express; you're likely to get best results if your breasts are reasonably full, eg. first thing in the morning. A good tactic is to get the baby to feed on one breast, give her the minimum she needs to not have hysterics when you take her off it, and then get expressing. I have always found it quite hard to trigger the let-down reflex by expressing alone, so I tend to let the baby do that bit, and then express once the milk's let down.

Don't have unrealistic expectations of how much milk you'll get to start with: a couple of ounces may well be all you'll manage. I tend to go through phases of expressing and build up a stock in the freezer (you can get special bags from Boots). If I know I'm going to miss a feed, then I express as much as I can after each feed during the preceding 24 hours. Expressing after finishing each feed is also quite a good way to build up your milk supply.

Hope this helps.

Hi Hayls, I have a 29 week old ds (still bf) and a 27 month old dd (bf for 12 months), and I have expressed both times using the Avent pump. I think I'm lucky as I've always found it easy (flip side of this is having power shower boobs and lots of leaking). I always found it easier to express first thing in the morning when I was slightly more full, not much as my ds/dd had 4 or 5 feeds in the night at 8 weeks, lucky you with your sleepy dd! I found that is ds/dd were close by then I could express more easily.

With ds I was more organised and I expressed quite a lot from 6 weeks to about 16 weeks and built up a good supply. I've been using it mainly for his morning cereal and for the odd time I've been out. I've saved it in 100ml lots this time as I found it's far better to save lots of little amount than defrost a big bag and then have to throw some away; with smaller bags you can always get another if you need it and there's less waste. I got into a routine of expressing every morning just to get a supply in the freezer.

With my friends there have been some who really struggled to express and some, like me, who found it dead easy, with no real rhyme or reason as to why, good luck with your expressing.

BTW, yesterday I found dd with the pump in hand, trying to express from her tummy and saying, 'No milk mummy, pump's broken, mummy mend it', how do you explain that one to her?

Hi Hayls! I b/f ds till 17 mths (5 weeks ago - sob!)
Up until about 5 mths he had a late feed at 11pm ish which dh woke him for. Dh gave him the milk I'd expressed at about 9/10pm. If I was tired, it meant I could go to bed early and not worry about the last feed.

I found it also really stimulated my supply, because ds was always too sleepy on the boob to get a really good feed at that time, but with a bottle of EBM, he could down anything between 4 and 8 oz really quickly and then zonk off to sleep. He was always so stuffed with the last bottle that he slept through from that feed till 7 am - hurrah! hth

Well I managed to express some milk today and was really proud of myself Wjen dd got hungry again I heated the bottle up and gave it to dh with dd but she refused to take it! She just screamed whenever it went near her mouth (she was definitely hungry)- I watched through a creak in the door. Eventually I gave inn and fed her with success. Does anyone have any advice on hiw to get her to take the occasional bottle?
BTW it wasd an Avent bottle- should I try another ttype?

Oh Hayls, bad luck!! Well done with the expressing though. I've never had the bottle problem but I know there are laods of threads on it and some good advice.

Good luck

Try this one

Hi Hayls ...
We have recently given DD (7 weeks) a bottle of expressed milk. Like Clayhead I have shower power boobs so expressing isn't a problem. What helps for me too is to express in the morning when my breasts are full ... and just after a feed ... I find the let down thing works if I think of dd ... then it comes gushing out!
In terms of getting her to take it ... I guess you just keep trying and eventually she will take it.
My dd didn't have a problem the first time but the second time (given at 10pm so that I could have a 'break' she took about an hour to take 3 oz and then woke up at 3am starving so I have told DH that we won't bother at the moment with the late feed because there is no point ... I would rather stay up late and b/f and then she will sleep longer ....
HTH .... Good luck

Thanks for the advice, will just persevere! Lol at shower power boobs, I have a set of them as well!

Hi Hayls, your DD sounds like my DS2! He didn't like the first few bottles of EBM we tried him on, then he was fine for a few weeks, then he went off it again although, to be honest I didn't give him many bottles then because I was always there! 3 nights ago DH tried him on a bottle and he was fine - now has had a bottle of EBM 4 days in a row - no problems. (he's 7 months btw)
Keep trying - it's really annoying when they won't take a bottle after you worked so hard to produce it but eventually, she should get the idea!

You've had losts of good advcie here - and as has been said, have a look at the other threads and you'll find more tips.

The only thing I would add is DO try to get your dd used to room temperature or even fridge temperature milk. It makes life a LOT easier! We were lucky in that ds would pretty much take the EBM as it came, whatever the temperature. But then, he never got the chance to find out what warmed EBM was like, to know what he was missing! The most I did in the early days (when I was back in hospital with an infection, but had started a "supplement with EBM" regime as he wasn't gaining weight) was run the refridgerated bottle under a hot top - but it was truly a token gesture and I soon stopped bothering.

There's never any need (unless the baby has a strong preference) for heating ebm or any other milk - in fact it's associated with scalds and there was a paper in the BMJ about it a couple of years ago.