There’s a myth in Asian community that breastmilk is derived from blood and that if you leave it out long enough, it will turn into reddish blood.  *gape*

Alrighty.  It’s a myth, okay.  Breastmilk is made in milk ducts and it’s not turned into breastmilk from anything but it’s a God’s precious gift for a baby.  So, nurse that little babies, mommies.

Okay, once you’ve expressed your breastmilk (from hereon will be referred to as EBM), either through hand-expressed or using a breastpump, you can either freeze it and/or refrigerate the EBM.

What is critical is that EBM must be stored in absolute sterile container, either bottles or specific bags meant to store EBM.  I’ve seen mothers skimping on these bottles and store their precious EBM in mineral bottles.  Major NO NO.  These days Avent has produced these screw top containers for storing EBM and because it’s screw-top, it has wide necks, great for hand-expressing as you don’t need to aim the sprays that much.

It is also important to label these containers of bottles of the day they were expressed so you can t ell which is still okay and which to discard.

Storage guidelines :

1. At room temperature. In colder climates where typical room temperature does not exceed 77° Fahrenheit, or 25° Celsius, the EBM can last for 4 to 8 hours.  However, Malaysia has a hot and humid weather and typical day temperature normally hovers above 30° Celsius.  So, it’s best not to leave the EBM outside of the refrigerator.
2. In the refrigerator. EBM can stand for up to 2 to 3 days ar below 32°–39° Fahrenheit (0°–3.9° Celsius)
3. In the freezer. EBM is typically stored longer in the freezer for between 2 months to 4 months if your freezer has a internal compartment inside the freezer itself where the temperature is constantly low.   But if you are like me, who uses the freezer to store everything , then it can only last for about 2 weeks.  But be careful not to place them at the door.  If you’re freezing the EBM, be cautious not to fill the EBM up to the rim of the container or bottles, as liquids do contract when it is frozen.  Sights of broken bottles and spilled EBM is the most heart-rending sights.  Seriously!

If you’ve thawed frozen milk, it is best to place it in the refrigerator and use in the spate of 24 hours.  I know it’s liquid gold, but if you baby refuses a feed but has touched the EBM, it’s best to discard that rather than save it for later. Bacteria would’ve entered the EBM and that can only mean trouble for the little tummies.

Hand Expression Technique is just an alternative method to express your breastmilk for your baby for those hours you’re at work or away and most importantly for you to continue giving your baby your precious breastmilk, even when you’re at the Boardroom.

I firmly believe that using your own hands to express breastmilk has serious benefits over the typical and more normal breast pumps.  Benefits not a lot of mothers know or even realised.

Maybe because we see around us those fancy gadgety two-funnel breast pumps and everyone around us uses one and we quickly succumb to the herd mentality.

So, that’s why I’m doing this.  Creating awareness and making mommies around the world realise that there IS another option.

A cheaper option.

A faster option.

A far more hygienic option.

I’m not advocating that you throw away your breast pumps just yet, but do explore this option.

Although I’m a major proponent of hand expressing, I do occasionally rent our electric breast pumps if I were to be away for more than 2 nights and during these long lonely days, hand expressing would be less effective.

What I’ll try to impart to you are the benefits which are definitely the ones that I felt the most during my 9 joyful years of breastfeeding one baby after another.

Today I’ll elaborate on my first and foremost motivation to hand express my breastmilk.

ENCOURAGE BETTER MILK FLOW

Most conventional breastpumps, use the vacuum method to coax breastmilk from its milk ducts.  Which is okay, logically.  Except that babies do not rely on pure vacuum power while they nurse.

If you observe a suckling baby, first he would massage the areola and he uses his jaws to suck, never the tongue alone.  And it’s like coaxing breastmilk from the ducts down to the nipple.

That’s what you do when you hand express.  You massage your breasts first.  And you when you express, try to rub your thumb from the flshy part of the breast towards the nipple and before you know it, the sprays will get stronger and a minute later, you could just relax while the letdown reflex works its magic.  You control the flow.

I’m not making this up, seriously.

My son Ariz needed a total of 30 oz of breast milk for the 8 hours I was at work.  Breast pumps would never get me that much with me cringing in pain.  But hand expressing did it for me.

I hand express my supply at 11ish in the morning and get 10 oz from each breast and at 3pm, another round and 5 ox per breast.  Tara! 30 oz.  And I was able to keep this up for 17 months.  Alhamdulillah.

So, there.

Now, we’re on to the real deal now.  We’re talking equipment. 

This is one of the many benefits of using the Hand Expression Technique to express your breastmilk instead of relying on a breast pump.

YOU DON’T NEED MUCH EQUIPMENT !

Well, maybe you need to have :

1. Both hands.  Clean, please?
2. Wide-mouth milk bottles.  I love the ones from Avent.
3. Some towels to wipe sprays (especially when you’re chatting with friends while you’re at it)
4. Pictures of your baby, to stimulate milk production.
5. Medela breast shells or breast pads, if you are have great let-down reflexes for the otehr breast.
6. Fridges or coolboxes to store the expressed breast milk bottles.  This is a cheat, I guess, cos you do’t really lug these around, would’ya?

Let’s dwell a little bit more now.

Your hands are all you need.  That’s the pump, that’s the engine and that’s God-given gifts to you.   They’re pretty much portable, easy to clean and ard to lose (unless you’re at a war somewhere, Transformers maybe?)

Wide-mouthed milk bottles.  The first pictures of hand expression I saw was a woman leaning about 1 foot away from a bowl.  Now, that looks a little hard.  So, I improvised.

I learned that effective expressing works when you target the nipple straight into the bottle.  Take care not to touch the bottle though.  You don’t want to introduce germs into your stock of EBM.

Towels are essentials.  If you’re like me, who are able to sprays dead a fly, a foot away, you need extra towels.  It’s easy to get distracted.  And if you’re distracted the milk still gets sprayed, all over the place.  That’s why you need the towel.

Plus, once you’re done, the only clean-up you need is to wipe your hands and breasts clean and that’s it.

Pictures of your baby is the easy way to stimulate letdown reflexes and milk production.  Think about your baby.  Usually, that’s enough to get me squirting away.

Breast pads or the Medela breast shells are extremely useful items to me, throughout my breastfeeding months.  I believe you need to have this on standby, because using hand expression gets the most milk out, at the fastest rate, and your other breast would be leaking milk too.  So, you might as well collect those.  Afterall, it’s hard work producing the milk, I ain’t letting it go to waste.

And of course to store the bottles of the expressed breast milk (EBM).

So,  there, you’re all set to go.

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Breastfeeding is one of the most magical experience I’ve had in my life and no one baby is the same as the next .  I have four and I think, I do have a tiny wee bit of authority to admit just that.

Anyhow.

Because I work full time and I am obligated to start work 2 months after the childbirth.   It’s a constantly stressful time.  But that needs a new post altogether.

You see, mu husband had athma when he was younger and being genetically hereditary, I became overly obsessed over breastfeeding.  I figure that, if I can’t avoid it, at least, I hope that I could at least lessen its onslaught.

So I was determined to exclusively breastfeed my baby.

Like most working young mother, I could not afford those fancy Medela or Avent breastpumps and I could just afford the manual breast pump, the one where it comes in many parts and funnels and you’re supposed to pump up and down, creating vacuum so breastmilk would collect in the bottle.

My first pump was attached to a bulb.  I later learned that that was meant to relieve engorgement and not meant to store expressed breastmilk.

Anyhow.

By week 1, I was not a hammpy camper, having to lug in the pump and pump away to not much milk collected and I especially hated having to carry the whole gangbang to wash those tricky funnels and tubes and whatnots.

There’s got to be something better, something easier and in my Dorling Kindersley Mother and Baby Book, I found it.  There was a picture of a woman, leaning over a wide-mouth bowl espressing milk.

And I was sold.

To me, the Hand Expression Technique to express my bountiful breast milk was the most natural thing to do, next to breastfeeding itself.

So, read up my next posts on how you can make it happen too.

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Okay. Now we get to the hard details.

It’s a new territory, this breastfeeding business.  And with anything at all, it serves you well, if you research the subject first.  And of course, there are thousands and thousands of websites telling you how to breastfeed, why you should breastfeed and where, who and everything in between.

I think I spent my pregnant days and months reading up on every single article I could find on it.

I decided then that BREASTFEEDING is the way to go for me.  And I set my mind.  That’s all is needed.  Not maternal instinct.  But pure awareness and determination.

And, that’s all you need.

A set mind.  Go to La Leche League (I love their articles) and read your pregnant self away.

Ciao!

You know, some people say that to breastfeed is a MATERNAL INSTINCT.

I dunno.

I seem to have to think about it months or years before I actually am in a situation that warrants the action.

So, this is my take.

When I became pregnant, no one I know breastfed their babies.  Okay, okay.  This was in 1998 and we’re living in a developed country where infant formula were the in think if you have babies.  This was not the States or the UK where the recognition of benefits of breastfeeding were shouted about.  This was where the huge market of those infant formula end.  The society has been brandished by years of advertisement that infant formula is far superior than the plain, basic mother’s milk.

And the worse is, our mothers, our grandmothers raised us all consuming the same thing and look at us.  All well and jolly. So, what’s wrong with the infant formula?

Let me scream this out!

It’s wrong!  It’s wrong!  It’s wrong!

The only problem is that I can’t be screaming this at my mom, or my grandmother.  So, most people just succumbed to this.

Luckily the times have changed and mothers, old and new are rediscovering the joy of breastfeeding.  But it has to be seen.  The habit has to be acceptably considered a norm before it can catch on.

And alhamdulillah, I believe that mothers here in Malaysia have grasped the idealogy that breastfeeding is far far superior than any man-made formula.

Part 2.  Next.

You know the feeling.

When all the huffing and the puffing is over and the pushing is done and you have that little bundle of joy in your arms.  He coos and he looks longingly in your eyes.  He wriggles and he stretches in your arms.  All wet and slippery.

And then he opens up and he yells.

Yikes!

Welcome to motherhood, mommies and daddies.

It never failed to bring soppy tears to my eyes, that first moments when Aliya, Ayisha, Adani and Ariz came into my world and blaring their sirens away.  Haha.

While the first 3 of my babies were presented to me, all cleaned up and screaming bloody murder, hungry.  My youngest son was handed over to me in his freshest form, slippery and wet and needing comfort.

And instinctively, I knew to put him on the breast.  That moment defined it.  Although I must it was kinda hard because you’re half-lying down, with a whole room of busy people milling around you and not to mention, the doctor would be sticting you up.

So, let me tell you this.

Forget them.  Look deep into your baby and feel the connection.  It doesn’t matter if you’re shy, but what matters at the moment was your baby needing you to comfort him, to hold him with your arms this time, instead of the womb.

Ahhh .. I feel like crying now.

By the way, it doesn’t have to be a full latch and a half hour marathon of nursing just yet.  Just to comfort him.  Just for a few minutes before the nurses will need to take the baby to check on him and clean him up.

Your world has just changed, my peers.  Changed forever.

*tsk tsk tsk*

Finally!

I know I miss breastfeeding. But seriously, after Ariz was born who is my 4th child and he has 3 other older sisters, I think I’m ready to call it quits where pregnancy and babies are concerned.

But, I figured that my 9 years of playing mummy-cow must count for something. So, the blog is meant to do just that.

I want to share with you, mommies and mommies-to-be, fathers, fathers-to-be and sisters and husbands and brothers and wives of what a joy it has been for me to be able to breastfeed and what more, I was able to very very efficiently manually hand expressed my breastmilk.

So, this is a chronicle of my journey and I hope you will start yours too, soon.