Hand Expression Technique : Equipment

July 23, 2009 | By azrina In Hand Expression Technique |

: Image by The Eggplant via Flickr

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 :

Both hands. Clean, please?
Wide-mouth milk bottles. I love the ones from Avent.
Some towels to wipe sprays (especially when you’re chatting with friends while you’re at it)
Pictures of your baby, to stimulate milk production.
Medela breast shells or breast pads, if you are have great let-down reflexes for the otehr breast.
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.