Combining Breastfeeding and Bottle Feeding and Returning to Work.
Maybe this question sounds familiar to the stage you are at with your own baby?
Amber writes: “I am looking for advice on purchasing a breast pump. My baby is one week old and breastfeeding well. I plan to return to work when she is 4 months old and will need to be expressing all her daytime feeds at this time. I am planning on introducing Expressed Breast Milk (EBM) with a bottle in the next few weeks to combine bottle and breastfeeding until I go back to work. I’m just not sure which electric breast pump will most suit my needs.”
For any parent, expressing milk is a good way to teach baby to drink a bottle from a young age, is a good backup plan incase you are away from your baby, and is nice for dad’s to help out too. It’s a good idea to introduce a bottle from an early age. Often parents leave it for 6 months or so, but by then their baby can be very picking about feeding and will often reject a bottle. Which is tricky and turns into a stressful time when you need to return to work and get them drinking from a bottle. (So good to prepare early).
The type of breast pump you need really does depend on how frequently you need to use it. As you will be pumping all of her feeds for the days you are working, then definitely a double breast pump is the best way to go – such as the Unimom Forte breast pump pictured below. Using a double breast pump obviously will cut down the amount of time that you need to sit on the chair expressing; but studies have also shown that pumping both breasts at the same time results in more milk than if you just pumped each breast individually. All of the double breast pumps on our website can handle high use such as this.
The most popular one that we sell is the Unimom Forte Breast Pump. It’s an affordable price point compared to medela and avent, simply because the Unimom brand is made in Korea whereas the other pumps are made in Switzerland and England. The Unimom Forte Breast Pump is becoming widely used in NZ hospitals, and is recommended by many midwives too.
The Unimom Forte has a high grade motor, and is capable of being used for all of baby’s feeds. (Of course it is also suitable if you are only pumping a little bit each day – it will make your time very efficient). The double pump will take about 8-10 minutes to express. It also comes with a one year warranty, and we do carry all the spare parts/bottles etc just incase you need them. It’s a reasonable size, not too bulky, and its not overly noisy either. But you would need to pump next to a power plug, which is something you might need to consider where you will use it at your workplace.
The Unimom Forte pump comes with everything you need to get pumping, though you’ll also need to buy a baby teat (we recommend the Chu chu teat). I know this all gets very confusing, so please let me know if you have any other questions; and I’m more than happy to answer them.
