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.”

“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.”