Podcast: Ep 28 - You don't need a bottle to have a break

Taking a break while breastfeeding

Jessica and Simone talk about what’s needed for a mum to take a break from their baby, whether it’s a trip to the supermarket, a coffee with a friend, or a night out. Spoiler alert: you don’t need to give your baby a bottle to take a break!

Links to resources and information discussed in this episode:

• Information on feeding baby when mum isn’t there. 
• Information on understanding baby sleep, including night time patterns. 
• Cluster feeding information. 
• Alcohol and breastfeeding information.
• Alcohol and breastfeeding: a guide for mothers brochure. 
• Feed Safe app, available for Apple iOS and Android.
• Ep 22 - Breastfeeding and alcohol podcast episode. 
• Information on how much breastmilk to express. 
• Storing expressed breastmilk information. 
• Expressing and storing breastmilk booklet, available for purchase as an instant download or order in print format.
• Information on giving baby expressed milk but not in a bottle, including cup feeding. 
• Paced bottle-feeding information.
• Carer's guide to the breastfed baby leaflet

Credits: This episode is presented by Jessica Leonard and Simone Casey. Audio editing by Jessica Leonard. Show notes by Belinda Chambers. Transcription by Laura Allison. Produced by Belinda Chambers, Jessica Leonard and Eleanor Kippen.

SIMONE: I just say go. You probably don't have to overthink it too much. Sure, have a plan, but you know, whether it's just going to the supermarket or having a coffee with your friend, a lot of the time we actually don't need a huge long break. We don't need to be out for 12 hours to get that little bit of adult free-time.

JESSICA: Welcome to breastfeeding with ABA, a podcast brought to you by volunteers from the Australian Breastfeeding Association. Breastfeeding with ABA is a podcast about breastfeeding made by parents for parents. In this episode, we're going to talk about whether you need to give your baby a bottle to have a break.

This podcast records in different parts of Australia. We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands we're recording on, and the lands you're listening on. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging and to any indigenous people listening. We also acknowledge the long history of oral storytelling on this country and of women supporting each other to learn to feed their babies. My name is Jessica, and I'm a breastfeeding counsellor with the Australian Breastfeeding Association. Today we’re recording on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. 

SIMONE: And my name is Simone and I'm a breastfeeding counsellor with the Australian Breastfeeding Association, an International Board-Certified Lactation Consultant working on the maternity ward in a hospital setting and in private practice in women’s homes.

JESSICA: And so, we're going to be talking about whether mums need to give the baby a bottle to have a break, do you think this is something that a lot of women worry about?

SIMONE: Yeah, I get questions about this a lot. Women wanting to know about expressing, how they can provide expressed milk to their babies. But sometimes when I actually delve into it and start talking to them a little bit more, I start to realise they're not really interested in giving them a bottle per se. They're interested in just having a bit of a break and being able to sort of, you know, do some other things away from their babies, which you know doesn't make you a bad mum. If you want to be away from your baby for a little while, because it's very all-consuming and if they can get a bit touched out and want to just spend a little bit of time off on their own for a little while.

JESSICA: So why would a mum want to have a break?

SIMONE: Breastfeeding means you've got a baby physically on you a lot of the day, and that sometimes it's just nice to think about your life before the baby, or just go and have you know, have a coffee with your friend. Sometimes it's even as simple as just wanting to have a bath on your own and not have to worry about the baby crying or needing a feed, or even just something like going out to dinner or meeting up with some family or some friends. 

JESSICA: So how did you manage to kind of pop out if you just needed to go and do something quickly when you had a small baby? What was your experience?

SIMONE: I’ve got three children. I do think with my third I was a little bit more casual about it and when I think back to the way I was, I sort of wish I did that more with my first when just decided, you know, if I need to go to the supermarket, which sounds pretty boring and mundane, but I used to love going to the supermarket all by myself and just reading the labels and taking lots of time and no one interfering and you know, 

JESSICA: Feels so luxurious doesn't it?

SIMONE: It does, and so you know, I'd say to my partner ‘Oh, you know, I'm just going to go to the supermarket’.  I and I would just make sure I timed it well, so if the baby, especially when my baby was quite young, I'd say ‘I've just fed him. He's just gone down’, but if you, obviously, I'm not going to be here for maybe an hour and a half, so I'd just go off and do my little supermarket thing and come back and sometimes baby had woken up other times he hadn't, and you know, I knew he was safe and loved and with my husband and it was OK if he did wake up so I didn't leave him any milk or anything like that. I just and when I got home, if he was awake then I fed him and I just knew that that was something that I was happy to do and that it was wasn't a big risk that he was going to go hungry. 

JESSICA: What about heading out at night? When do you think a parent who's feeding their baby can realistically expect to be able to do?

SIMONE: I think that it's not when they're a brand-new baby. I do think that's something that happens a little bit later. I usually find around the three-month period when their circadian rhythms are developing, so that means that baby starts to know the difference between day and night, and you will notice that they have a longer sleep in that sort of evening, maybe past 8 or 9:00 o’clock part of the evening. They often do cluster feed as well before that, and then they’ll go into a really nice long sleep. And so that’s your window of opportunity to maybe go out in the evening, and I do remember with my, same with my, I think it was my third baby as well, we used to have our mums at the pub night, and so we'd go out and I'd just say to them look, I'll go as soon as I’ve fed the baby, and so I'd feed the baby. And who knows, it might be 7:00 o'clock. Might be 8:00 o'clock. Might be 8:30, but it was usually around that time and I'd just deal with whatever I had to do at the time. So if they'd already had dinner, I'd probably just have a drink or whatever. But yeah, that's how I used to do it and.

JESSICA: Yeah, or just pop in for dessert.

SIMONE: Yeah, that's right. I think also, if you were going out in the evening and you wanted to line up with some friends, you're the one with the baby. So, I always think they can come to near your area. Everyone’s got a mobile phone now, so if you really needed to be called away, you know that you could get that call and probably be home in 5 or 10 minutes if you get to choose where you have the dinner. So I think that helps. If if your friends are understanding or the people you're meeting are understanding that ‘OK, she's got the little baby, why don't we, and she wants to have a little bit of a break let's go somewhere near her’.

JESSICA: Yeah, and as babies get older as well, it is easier if you do want to have an alcoholic drink to kind of time that around your feeds as well. It's the same as sort of leaving them for a little bit longer. Once they're over a few months old, you can have a glass of wine and then know that it might be a little while before you have to feed them again.

SIMONE: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so that's all about timing as well, and if they are that that little bit older and we know that they might not, you know, we might be five or six hours before we have to feed again, that you've got plenty of time to metabolise a glass of wine or or a beer or whatever you wanted to have. There's also the app on the ABA website that you can look up and actually work out when is the safest time to feed after you've had an alcoholic drink.

JESSICA: Yeah, and there's a brochure as well that’s got a lot of really detailed information.

SIMONE: I did want to talk about I guess, about the reasons why you might want to avoid using a bottle because some women just through choice, they decide they don't want to use a bottle because maybe they're worried about babies developing a bottle preference. You might get some babies and it's quite common for breastfed babies to refuse to take a bottle, especially older ones. So, anything after I find, about 10 weeks onwards, you find babies that might have taken a bottle previously not wanting to take one anymore and they just sort of, you put it in their mouth and they just play with it and bite it and don't really drink from it. And so those parents usually call me particularly worried that suddenly their baby who was always taking a bottle before won't take one anymore, which you know, I reassure them that it is really common and that there are some alternate ways to feed the baby expressed milk if you do need to give them some. So some of those ways could be something like an open cup. If the baby is about five months onwards, I find that they will take a straw cup and I find that breastfed babies do quite like straw cups because they control the flow, a little bit like a breastfed baby does with the breast. They stop and they start when they want to, whereas a bottle flows without them giving it permission to and then they sort of go ‘Oh, I don't want this’ and they might start to freak out and not really like the flow of a bottle. So that sort of thing happens as well. 

JESSICA: Yeah, neither of my children ever really took to taking a bottle, but they would often take expressed breast milk either through an open cup or just a little sippy cup. And my oldest who was particularly fussy would sometimes have a little kind of a breast milk slushy, so it’d be frozen and she’d just sort of spoon it into her mouth even when she was quite young, and before she'd started solids. That was one of the ways that would get her through if I wanted to go out somewhere for a little bit longer. 

SIMONE: Yeah, and look the other option, I guess once their babies are over six months and have started solids is, you know, give him a banana while you're waiting for mum to come home so, or you know whatever they eat, so sometimes a baby who's, even though they're breastfeeding or on solids, you've got a little bit of a back-up there as well if you haven't left a bottle, or if you don't want to give a bottle while you're gone. So that's sometimes a bit of an opportunity and you can mix breastmilk into solids as well. So, if you did want to use some of your milk and they're not taking a bottle, that could be an option as well. 

JESSICA: So what advice would you give to anyone listening who is thinking about, you know, they want to have a break, they want to get out there. What would you say to them? 

SIMONE: I’d just say go, you probably don't have to overthink it too much. Sure have a plan, but you know, whether it's just going to the supermarket or having a coffee with your friend, a lot of the time we actually don't need a huge long break. We don't need to be out for 12 hours to get that little bit of adult free-time. You can just do that in an hour or two and quite often that is the window between a feed so you can get that time and you can just go and your baby is not going to starve. If you've got someone that's with them that loves them and cares for them, even if they did sort of go ‘hang on where's mum’ waiting for you to come home, doing things like walking around, showing them outside, lots of little distraction techniques, especially with a slightly older baby, you’re usually pretty fine. Younger ones, you might just need to do a bit of cuddling while they wait for mum to come home. But again, mobile phones, you can contact someone and say you know, actually, they're probably pretty hungry, now let's just come home, and that's fine. Even if your free time got cut short, at least you got to have something, and it's usually pretty fun just to be out in the wide world without your baby there, just for a few little moments.

JESSICA: Yeah, that's right. And even if you start small and start with a half hour coffee with a friend at a cafe around the corner from your house, don't start with, you know four hours away from your baby maybe might take a little bit longer for them to get to you.

SIMONE: That's fine.

JESSICA: Starting slow is a really good way to think about it and just go, ‘yeah, it's OK’. It will start with this and yes, that was fine, and then make it a little bit longer each time that you take time for yourself.

SIMONE: Yeah yeah, and I do think sometimes women also have a bit of trouble with expressing they feel a bit worried, because ‘oh gee I only got 20mLs and my baby needs 100’, so then they're like ‘Oh my God, I can't do this’, whereas if we just space the feeds and do all the sort of things we're talking about, you don't actually even have to worry about it too much.

JESSICA: Thanks Simone, for chatting with me today. You can check out the show notes for a link to Simone's blog and to some other information as well. If you're in a position to support the work ABA does financially, you can become a member by visiting breastfeeding.asn.au and that'll link you in with your local group as well. If you need some online support, you can join our breastfeeding with ABA Facebook group so you can just search for that and there's three joining questions to get into that group, so make sure you answer those first. If you want to speak to a breastfeeding counsellor, call the National Breastfeeding helpline on 1800 686 268 so that's open 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Our live chat service is another option so you can check the website to see when that's open. Thanks, heaps for listening. We'd love it if you can rate, review and subscribe to the breastfeeding with ABA podcast wherever you're listening.

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