Are you planning to get back to work within 6 months of delivery? Don’t worry about nursing your baby. Today, you have many powerful pumps with which you can express breast milk easily. After expressing you can store your milk safely and hygienically so that you can ensure that your baby gets the best nutrients, even if you aren’t near him physically. In this article, we will tell you some important tips about expressing and storing breast milk.
Expressing your breast milk
You may want to return to work within 6 months of delivery or may be your baby is having problems sucking breastmilk. In such cases, the best solution for you would be to express your breast milk and store it to be fed later to your baby. When you express your breastmilk, you don’t have to be near your baby to breastfeed him. There are three ways in which you can express your breast milk.
The three ways are hand expression, manual pump, and electric breast pump. Hand expression is the most traditional method of expressing breast milk. Here, you use your hand to squeeze your breast well and express milk from it.
The manual pump is an affordable unit through which you can easily pump milk with a hand-held device. The electric breast pump runs on battery and is very effective in helping you extract a large amount of breast milk in a very short time.
Storing breast milk
You can store breast milk in four different formats – room temperature, refrigerator, freezer and cooler packs. Let us look at each of them in detail here.
- Under room temperature, you can store your breast milk in clean bottles and use it within 4 hours of expression . The maximum room temperature that you can store your milk here is around 77 degrees Fahrenheit.
- When you plan to store your breast milk in the refrigerator, you can keep it for up to 4 days from the day of expression. If you are storing more than a bottle at a time, you have to ensure that you label the bottles neatly, so that you can feed your baby according to the time of expression.
- you want to freeze your milk, you have to ensure that you use clean bottles for the purpose. Freshly expressed breastmilk stays good in the freezer for up to 6 months from the date of expression. Labelling the bottles with the date and time of expression is very important in this process as well. When you are using coolers or insulated cooling packs for storing breast milk, you should remember to use the pumped milk within 24 hours of expression. If you don’t use the milk within 24 hours, ensure that you refrigerate it or freeze it right away.
For storing breast milk, it is very important to use specialised human milk storage bags available in the supermarket. If you are using bottles, please remember to use BPA-free plastic only, so that the chemicals in the bottles don’t get mixed with your milk. Following these, will ensure that your baby gets the best quality of your breast milk, even when you aren’t near him.
