By expressing your milk when at work, to be fed to your baby when they are away from you, you can continue to 100% breastfeed your baby with your own milk. However, as Fiona, who works long hours and sometimes shifts, says, it's not for everyone: “I can quite understand not wanting to express though: I've never been much good at it, though I did express at work til my second child was 18 months old: in all honesty though I would almost certainly have stopped doing it rather earlier than that had he not been allergic to dairy produce.” “With a combination of expressing, dashing over to feed him at lunchtime and having my husband bring him to me when I was working outside normal "office hours" we managed. There are lots of different options, but returning to work doesn't have to mean a complete end to breastfeeding.”

“My second child is cows' milk protein allergic, so that gave me a huge incentive to keep expressing. That, and a new job, meant that he had expressed breast milk in the day til he was 18 months and I decided he could do without milk during work hours. He's still breastfed morning and evening now. What will I do with my next baby? Well, I don't know for sure...having managed to express last time, I'll give it my best shot again, but unless he's also allergic will probably stop expressing at 12 months.”

Here are some tips:
Express as often as you can, as after your own baby feeding directly, this is the next best way to keep supply up. If there's any way that baby can be brought to you during the day for a direct feed, take advantage: it's nice for both of you, and probably better for your employer as you're likely to feed her quicker than you express! Fiona says: “We did this with evening feeds with both of ours and it made life easier all round. With my son, his nursery is literally round the corner from nursery, so I used to take my sandwiches and feed him there at lunchtime too.”

Evidence shows that the most effective way of getting lactation going for Mums who are having to 100% express for their babies eg those where baby is in the NICU. are found by expressing at least 8-10 times every day, with at least one of those times being during the night becauser that's when prolactin production is highest.

Evidence shows that breast massage before expression - whether hand expressing or pump - produces a better yield.

Here's how to do breast massage:
Start by firmly stroking the breast from the outside in to the nipple, all the way round, but being careful not to dig fingers or nails in or drag the skin; then use a drumming action with the 'inside' of flat fingers, again all the way round and from the outside to the areola; next a 'rolling' action using the flat part of the outside of the knuckle - middle bones on your fingers (the bit you'd use for kneading dough), rolled from the outside are of the breast to the middle. Finally a little nipple twiddling as a final bit of stimulation.

If you are expressing with baby in sight that's good, otherwise have something to help the 'let down' - a photo, a blankets, a sleepsuit, whatever. Being stressed inhibits let down and so try not to put pressure on yourself to 'perform'.

Have you considered hand expressing? There's a decent guide in the link below, on pages 14 & 15 - but again make sure you massage first, as above.
http://www.dh.gov.uk/ prod_consum_dh/groups/ dh_digitalassets/documents/ digitalasset/dh_125827.pdf

There's a great Breastfeeding Network leaflet on Expressing and Storing, available through this link: http://breastfeedingnetwork.org.uk/pdfs/BFNExpressing&Storing.pdf

It has some evidence-based recommendations on storage times, too - see below:


Fiona says: “Sterilising... must confess I never bothered, just washed in very hot water. If you want to sterilise though, how about buying a microwave steriliser? They are simple to use, not too bulky and if you have a microwave at work that would solve the problem. Get a little cool bag for your bottles on the way home, especially if you have a long journey.”