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[graciouslittlethings]

Back to Work for Breastfeeding Mums (Part 1: Stocking Up Milk)

With most companies in Malaysia providing employees with 2 months of maternity leave, we working mothers really cut it close.

I had 1 month of confinement to battle through new challenges: learning new mummy skills like carrying / bathing /cleaning up baby, learning how to breastfeed and running on hardly any sleep.

Month 2 was when my anxiety set in. Worried about insufficient milk and wondering if I’d be able to store up enough for Baby Dozer. On hindsight, I needn’t have worried about the milk storage part because planning was all I needed to prepare properly.

After a lot of research, worries and boring Hubs half to death with my incessant grouses about insufficient milk, I managed to nail it with what I call the REST method!!!

1. RECORD.

I had been directly breastfeeding Baby Dozer throughout my confinement with the occasional expressing and feeding through bottle when my nipples were sore. I started recording the feeding times to get an idea of how many times Baby Dozer fed in a day.  2. EXPRESS.

After each direct feeding session, I would express my breastmilk. At first, it started out as less than 1 ounce from both sides, but I diligently did it after each feed and after 2 days, it started visibly increasing. 3. STORE.

If you have been direct feeding like me, you won’t really know how much baby needs for each feed. So what I did was to do some online research to figure out roughly how much babies drink at this point and this is what I found:

I really like this picture because it not only shows you how much milk babies need, it also shows the approximate size of a baby’s stomach, which helps me to better visualise! According to the picture above, a one month old can drink anything from 2.5 oz to 5 oz! I asked around as well and most people told me 3 oz should be sufficient. I settled on 90ml and kept up this discipline of expressing after each direct feed until I had managed to store 5 bottles of 90ml each. 

4. TRYOUT. Once I achieved my target of 5 bottles of 90ml each in the fridge, it was trial time! This was the most challenging part. The whole aim of the tryout for me back then was to:

Try get Baby Dozer to feed 3-hourly instead of 2-hourly, which I had been practising since birth

Find out exactly how much milk Baby Dozer needed for each feed

During the hours where I was supposed to be at work, my mother-in-law fed Baby Dozer via bottle. On my part, I made sure to express each time Baby Dozer fed. We continued the tryouts for a few days, before we finally managed to get the timing and amount right. 

Baby Dozer was around 6 weeks old at the time of the tryouts. Here’s what we did:

Start with 90ml. We started off by giving Baby Dozer 90ml and then waiting until he cried before the next feed. Before this, I had been feeding Baby Dozer every 2 hours even if he didn’t cry.

Tweak the feed amount. As you can see from the schedule above, Baby Dozer couldn’t last through 3 hours, so we increased the quantity he drank to 100ml. That too didn’t work so we added on an extra 20ml if he still cried after the feed. And….Baby Dozer STILL CRIED even after the extra 20ml! My mother instincts were telling me that something was wrong because he was still very colicky at this time. Also, whenever I fed him beyond 120ml, he tended to bring the milk back up. I finally decided to settle at 110ml and sometimes Baby Dozer would be able to last for the targeted 3 hours and sometimes he would cry for milk even before 2 hours! On hindsight, I realise that Baby Dozer’s cries may not have been purely due to hunger.   Remember, he was going through a very colicky phase and would suddenly cry for no reason even immediately after his feed. By cry, I mean shriek terribly as if in great pain. I wrote about his colicky phase here. If you’re going through the same thing at the moment, trust your instincts! If something tells you that he’s not crying out of hunger, you most likely are right. The whole world will tell you he’s hungry (your parents, in-laws, husband, aunties, etc.) but learn to trust yourself!

Settle on the amount you FEEL is best. There’s no CORRECT amount. Later on, I actually had to lower his milk intake to 90ml each feed because the paediatrician advised me to feed Baby Dozer more frequently in smaller amounts as he was constantly bringing up his milk with each feed. Reducing from 110ml to 90ml indeed helped and Baby Dozer actually CRIED LESS. Ironic, huh?

I’ll write again soon about Part 2: Settling into a Milk Expressing Schedule at work. In the meantime, good luck!  

If you’re a new mother preparing to return to work, I hope you find the above tips helpful! Do let me know if you’d like to know more details or have any questions!

As an ex-expatriate and management consultant in an international firm, Grace was a career-minded woman on a fast-track path in the corporate world. The birth of her first child changed her perspectives in entirety, and she made the life-changing decision of becoming a stay-at-home mum. In addition to being one of Malaysia’s top digital influencers on Nuffnang’s Bloggerati list, she is a Dr. Sears Certified Health Coach and also runs children-related businesses (links available below).

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