Exclusively pumping means that you are using a breast pump to express breastmilk rather than nurse the baby directly to breast feed(or as some say, feed him/her directly from the tap.) Most of us who do this have ended up here because our babies won't latch and so we couldn't directly breastfeed, for whatever reason. It is harder to exclusively pump than it is to nurse and it is harder to exclusively pump than it is to feed baby formula. You are in a grueling schedule loop of feeding by bottle, pumping and cleaning everything. Nursing to breast feed directly would have been so much easier. I got very little sleep during the peak of my exclusive pumping career. So it's useful to have some shortcuts and strategies in place to make life easier.
With that in mind, here are my best tips for those who are exclusively pumping:
- Keep a log or journal. During the prime of my exclusively pumping career my journal consisted of one page per day in a small notebook. Each page had two columns -- one for when and how much breastmilk Jack drank and another for when and how much and for how long I pumped. By keeping this log I could quickly identify if I was experiencing a dip in my breastmilk supply and could take measures to correct it. It also let me know if Jack was gaining on me so I could take measures to TRY to increase my supply again.
- Get the battery pack for the pump. I used a Medela Pump in Style breast pump and it came with a battery pack. Make sure you have batteries. Even if you are at home all the time, you never know when the power might go out. Think of how awful it would be to have a hungry infant, engorged breasts and no way to get the breastmilk out. Also very useful for pumping when away from home. I used mine a lot for this.
- Get the car adapter. I wish I'd done this in the beginning, because there were maybe a dozen times when I pumped while driving (with a hands-free bustier to hold the "horns" in place). This was super convenient, because I often did it when commuting to trade shows or public events. When I attended these it was hard to duck away to use the breast pump. It was also easier to leave the breast pump in the car when I went to such events rather than drag both it and my briefcase/laptop around all day.
- Get some extra horns, membranes, valves. I didn't do this for several months after I started, so I was washing everything EIGHT times a day. This did not help me get more sleep.
- Get an extra pump, if you can afford it. If you are exclusively pumping, you will be lugging the pump wherever you go, like an extra baby. You can buy used breastpumps on eBay and just replace all the tubing. (The pump makers don't recommend this, but my lactation consultant had no problem with it. The tubing is the only stuff that comes into contact with bodily fluids, i.e. a mother's milk.) If you have two breastpumps, you can use one at work and one at home. Or one upstairs and another downstairs. Or keep one in the car and the other one at home. I broke down and bought a second one when Jack was about 4 months old, and it made a big difference.
- Get some Medela microwave steam bags. These make sterilizing your stuff quick and easy. You can reuse each bag something like 20 times. What a time saver.
- Buy a hands-free bustier. When I discovered these, they changed my life. Think about it. I was pumping a total of 3 hours plus a day. That's 3 hours of not being able to use my hands because they were holding the horns to my boobs. Once I got the bustier, I could read, I could surf the Web, I could do email, I could write thank you notes. (And when I went back to work, I even conducted phone interviews while pumping, taking notes by typing...) I even drove my car while pumping.
- Buy an extra hands-free bustier. Good for laundry day. Also, nice to have one in the extra pump bag.
- If you are out all day, take some sturdy freezer bags with you for storing the milk. (There are freezer bags that are made specifically for storing breastmilk -- use this kind, not your common ziplocks.) These take up less space in the cooler section of the pump bag, so you can fit more in there than if you use the bottles. I could never fit all the bottles I needed in that little cooler section.
- Put your pump horns in a ziplock in the refrigerator between pump sessions. You can do this one time and get away with not washing it in between.
- If you freeze breastmilk, defrost it after about a month or six weeks to make sure it's still good. Some women have a problem with excess Lipase (a kind of fat) that makes the milk go bad sooner than other women's milk does when it is refrigerated or frozen. This happened to me and I had to dump something like 100 ounces of breastmilk. I struggled to get that much to freeze and it was a heartbreaker to dump it. If you test it six weeks later, you can make sure it's OK after the thaw. (If you have this problem, you can still freeze your milk. But there's an extra step involved. Immediately after pumping you need to put it in a saucepan and heat it until you just start to see little bubbles -- called scalding it. Then let it cool, put it in a bag and freeze it. This is supposed to fix the problem.)
- If you compress your breasts as you pump you can get more milk. Also, I've heard some women say that when they play with their babies as they use the breastpump they get more breastmilk.
- Foods that are said to increase milk volume include oatmeal and beer. (I don't drink, and I know there are rules about breastfeeding and drinking alcohol, so I drank non-alcoholic beer.)
- Make sure you are drinking enough water.
- Watch out about cutting your calories too drastically in an effort to lose that baby weight. I found that when I made cuts my supply dropped a little bit too.
- A lot of the pump moms do something called "cluster pump" to boost supply. They pump until their milk runs out and then turn off the pump for 10 minutes. Then they pump again until the milk runs out and then turn the pump off again for 10 minutes. Repeat a few times. This simulates what it's like when the baby does a cluster feeding right before a growth spurt. For me, a long session often worked better. Try both ways and see what works better for you.
- Use a good pump. Lots of people rent the hospital grade pumps and swear by them. My lactation consult recommended the Medela Pump in Style or (I think the other one was the Ameda Purely Yours.) The Pump in Style worked well for me.
- When you are out with your pump, take a receiving blanket with you, or invest in a poncho that can double as a cover-up for when you are pumping in the car or elsewhere. In a pinch I put on my blazer backwards...
- Be nice to yourself. You are doing an amazing thing, and it's not an easy thing to do either. It is hard to feed the baby a bottle, then pump, then wash everything. I think I got about 4 hours of sleep total a day during Jack's first 3 or 4 months of life.
