Hi guys, I’m Melissa welcome back to CloudMom. Talking today about one of my favorite topics,
breast milk and breastfeeding! And I’m answering a question from a young mother in Singapore,
and here’s what she has to say. Her name is Nim, um first of all thanks for saying you
love my videos you made my day. It just makes me so excited when I see people from far away
that have been able to appreciate the videos or that they’ve been helpful so thanks so
much. So here’s the question, she writes, "Melissa, I’m the mother of a 12 day old
newborn. I wanted to ask a question regarding your video about building your breastfeeding
supply. You mentioned to pump a little bit after every feed throughout the day, my question
is in between those pumping episodes do you just leave the bottle out the entire day or
do you put the whole thing in the fridge and take it out to pump again? But if it put it
in the fridge, I can’t put it in the freezer later? My supply isn’t super great so I’m
really trying to hope to work this out but I’m worried about milk contamination. I
live in Singapore where the weather is hot and humid all year long." Ok, these are amazing
questions; I’ve gotten them many times. I struggled with these issues myself many
times, and here is my tried and true advice. When you pump, take the breast milk you have
pumped, put it in a bottle and keep it in your refrigerator. Pump into bags or pump
into bottles, but the next time you pump you will use a fresh new bottle and the breast
milk that you pumped previously will stay in the refrigerator. At the end of the day, you should
have built up little bits and pieces of breast milk. When I first started doing this I was
getting like one ounce at a time, sometimes only even half an ounce at a time. Really,
very very little. But guess what, if you pump four times, and I’m not a great mathematician
but here it goes, and you get one ounce, at the end of the day you have four ounces! If
you pump six times you have six ounces! That’s a pretty nice looking bottle of milk. So what
you do is, you keep the milk you’ve already pumped in the refrigerator, you add to that
each time, you pump either into bottles or into bags, I use the Medela bottles, and then
at the end of the day you freeze. You write the date and you freeze. Now your baby is
teeny teeny tiny, only 12 days old, so I would be freezing very small amounts of milk. I
would say maybe only just like two ounces. As your baby gets older and starts to drink
more and more, he or she might be drinking four ounces at a feeding, maybe even five ounces,
you can freeze larger quantities of milk. But you want to keep the quantities you freeze
small because you don’t want to have to defrost that milk, give it to the baby and
have your baby not finish that amount of milk. Here’s one more thing to remember. Milk
is best when frozen fresh. So, if you do pump and you have for example two ounces and that’s
the amount that you want to freeze, go ahead and freeze it right away. It’s always best
to pump and freeze it when it’s fresh. Similarly, if you have pumped milk and it’s been in
your refrigerator for more than a day, you can no longer freeze that milk. You have to
give that milk directly to your baby, you have this period of time in which you can
do that, all those rules are up on my website on cloudmom.com because they’re so important.
You want to make sure that breast milk is fresh, that it’s healthy, that it’s at
its optimal nutritional level and that’s what those rules are designed to do. So anyway
I’m so grateful that you wrote in, these were amazing questions. Best of luck breastfeeding
your baby, I hope this is helpful, thank you so much for watching CloudMom and I will
see you next time.