Ideally, you will be planning to or have already started expressing your milk at around six weeks before going back to work.
This gives a working mum time to develop a mastery in expressing milk and building a stash in your freezer.
In most cases, mothers are advised to begin the process as soon as they give birth so as to have enough milk as possible.
But this often seems like the easy bit compared to how you are going to introduce the baby to the expressed milk through the bottle.
For some babies, introducing a bottle past the age of around 8-12 weeks can be quite difficult. At any given time, babies will prefer the nipples rather than the bottle.
But unfortunately, this is not always feasible, especially when mothers return to work.
For some mothers, they are lucky to pop into their houses and breastfeed their babies during their work day. But, for other mothers, this is not possible.
I decide to talk Amanda* who narrates to the Star how she was forced to spend over Sh 10,000 to buy different feeding bottles after the baby refused to use the bottle to feed.
Amanda says that she made sure that she purchased the best bottle in the market.
“…two weeks after putting to bed, i bought Tommee tipee, a bottle that was believed to give the baby the soothing effect that my breast nipples give,” she said.
“The first week it was a walk in the park, second week we even did better than the previous one and after one month, I was certain that she was ready for bottle feeding and would not stay hungry even if I was asked to report back to work before the end of the 90 days.”
Amanda then took off one week without using the bottle. After a few days, she decided to try her again but her baby Cynthia* begun throwing tantrums.
Amanda says she tried bottles from different companies from the most expensive one that cost Sh1,800 to the cheapest that cost Sh30.
“…but my Toto refused…i even tried spoon feeding, she refused…forcing her would make her cry and even look like she was going to get sick .It broke my heart as each day it became tougher,” she said.
“I now started trying different teats on the variety of bottles I had, but unfortunately, it didn’t work. I wished she would speak but I just had to understand her as that was my job as her mother.”
With only a week to go back to work, Amanda said her frustrations and fear begun to build up.
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