Truly Happy Baby ... It Worked for Me: A practical parenting guide from a mum you can trust. Holly Willoughby

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      Lay your baby on her tummy vertically along your body. Make sure she’s properly latched on so she doesn’t drag on the nipple.

Expressing breast milk …

      Expressing milk means extracting breast milk by hand or using a pump. The milk can be kept for a feed, so anyone can give it, not just you! Regular expressing is a great way to help establish your milk supply. Other good reasons to express:

      • It frees you up to have a well-earned snooze.

      • You might be struggling with feeding your baby directly from the breast, but still want to give her breast milk (and keep your supply up).

      • Your baby might not be emptying the breast fully, so you need to express off the rest.

      • You are suffering from a breast infection or engorged breasts and it’s too painful to feed directly.

      I expressed in different ways, for different reasons and with varying regularity, for each of my babies. In all honesty I think you need to focus on getting your milk really established for the first three months, which means looking to feed or express every three to four hours, ideally. This might sound like an arduous task at a time when you’ve never been so tired, but after you’ve put the work in your milk will be there, and more often than not it won’t go away even if you want it to!

      There’s a lot of talk about expressing between feeds to increase your milk supply and I think it certainly helps, particularly if you’re struggling with breastfeeding. If your baby is taking some milk from the breast but not emptying it, offer her a bottle of expressed milk if you have some stored – or formula – to top her up. And then express the rest of the breast to empty it fully. This way your milk will replenish and there will be plenty there for the next feed. If you are part bottle- and part breastfeeding, you might hear the term ‘nipple confusion’. Personally I think this is rubbish! If you get your baby used to anything early on and keep swapping from one thing to another, she will see it as normal, but you should consider all the facts for yourself and make your own decision about this.

      Due to Chester’s reflux, I battled with breastfeeding for two and a half months until, eventually, I had to face the fact that breastfeeding was just not for him. He couldn’t get on with it and it wasn’t making him happy, which was stressing me out, which in turn was having an effect on my milk supply. I ended up expressing every feed for the next few months until I decided that expressing, on top of sterilising and feeding with two other children in tow, was just too much and it was time to hit the formula.

      If, like me with Harry, you are successfully breastfeeding all your feeds, I don’t think you need to express in between, unless you want to express a bottle for your partner to give the baby so you can head to bed early and get a decent sleep! With all three of my children I expressed one of the night feeds for Dan to give so I could get to bed after the 7pm feed. But I would still wake up at around 11pm to express off that feed and save it for the following night, or else my breasts would have engorged or I’d have risked my milk not replenishing enough for the last night feed.

      Breast pumps Breast pumps simulate a baby’s sucking action to get your milk flowing but there are so many to choose from! I think it’s better to see what your situation is before you buy a pump. When I was pregnant with Harry I googled one of those ‘What to buy for your baby’ lists and went shopping, and one of the things on the list was an electric breast pump. It wasn’t until I actually used it that I discovered it was really noisy, which isn’t ideal in the middle of the night when you’ve finally got the baby off to sleep. I didn’t really need to express much at all with Harry, so I tried a manual hand pump instead, which was a fraction of the price, much quieter and completely portable (although it did of course take longer to express the milk).

      So work out the best and cheapest expressing option for you. Mummy websites review most of the main brands and there are plenty of discussion threads. Pumps vary quite a bit in price, from the basic manual hand pump I had with Harry to hospital-grade double electric pumps. When I realised what sort of feeding regime I was in for with Chester, I rented one of these; because it was a double pump it was much quicker – and quieter – than my old shop-bought electric one.

      Does expressing hurt? There’s no two ways about it – when you’re expressing milk you’ll feel like a cow with its udders hooked up to a milking machine! But it shouldn’t hurt. If you’re using an electric pump there will be several power settings, and if you’ve got it cranked up to the highest one, hoping to produce more milk, you’ll be in agony and probably produce less milk than you would if it was on a lower, more comfortable setting. Experiment to find the comfiest setting for you. If you’re in pain, you won’t produce the oxytocin that triggers your milk letdown (see here).

      Another reason for expressing being painful might be the size of the part of the pump that covers the nipple. If your nipple is too big and is being squashed on all sides once you start the machine up, you might need a bigger part. There should be space around the nipple or it’s naturally going to chafe, so find out if your pump has different sizes.

      Once you get it right, expressing should be really easy and you’ll soon find ways of clamping the cones into your breastfeeding bra so you can be hands-free to blow-dry your hair whilst pumping! Every second of you-time counts!

      Storing breast milk Freshly expressed breast milk should be placed in the fridge immediately and kept for no longer than 72 hours. If you put it in freezer bags or those special milk bags and date it, you can freeze it for up to six months. Remember that breast milk changes as your baby grows and her needs evolve. If you’re giving her a feed you expressed two months ago, there may not be all the nutrients she needs at that point. So if you are freezing milk, use the earliest dates first.