Learning To Extract Your Milk

If your baby is very small and cannot suck yet, or when you cannot feed him every two hours for some reason, you will need to learn to express your own milk.

In order to express your milk, you can do this by using a manual or electric pump. Although you will ultimately decide how you prefer to do this, in other words, combing both methods or choosing one of them, doing this with a manual breast pump has proven to not be as effective as the electric ones.

It is very important and fundamental you conceive the process of extracting your milk as something pleasurable, not as an obligation or demand, as this will only cause you to become tense and will reduce the amount of milk you will get out and delay the whole learning process.

It is convenient you know though that:

• A greater amount of milk can only be achieved with more stimulation, always having in mind that the ideal is the real suction done by the baby.
• You can extract your milk frequently. Later on, you will be able to space out your time to do this if there is an adequate rhythm between offer and demand.
• Sometimes what you will need is to rest and sleep more.
• Milk varies from one extraction to another as far as the amount is concerned.
• You can extract all the milk from one breast and then go on to the other one; although it is recommended you alternate from one to the other with small rest intervals. However, as you may have realized there are not rules when it comes to this.
• The ejection reflex of the milk produces that expulsion in a natural way. Since the ejection reflex is very influenced on psychological factors, it is important you feel confident in respect that you can breast feed your baby if you so desire. It has even been seen that this reflex increases when the mother carries her baby, hears the baby cry, or thinks about feeding her baby.
• You do not need to wash your breasts every time you need to extract you milk or afterwards, when you do breastfeed your baby. A daily shower will be enough, as the breasts have their own natural antiseptic secretion. It is necessary you wash your hands meticulously though before each extraction.