Tips for Breastfeeding Mothers who Go Overseas

(Special thanks to Fei Ru and Siaw Fui for sharing their experiences with all breastfeeding moms.)

Breastfeeding while travelling is not a ‘mission-impossible’. We would like to share our experience of bringing EBM back to Malaysia from overseas trips, to countries like Taiwan, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore with other mums.

• What do you need?

A set of good breast pump, breast milk storage bags / container & accessories, good quality cooler boxes (recommended 1 big and 1 small), ice bricks, some thick towels and most importantly – positive mindset. Manual (or battery operated) pump is recommended, as an electric outlet is not always available especially in toilets – most of the time this is the only available place to express.

• How to choose the right cooler box?

It depends on the quantity of EBM you can express daily. For example, if you can get 8oz of EBM every 4 hours, within 24 hours you will have 48oz of EBM / approx. 1.45 L. Multiply with the number of days per trip (the longest that you are expecting), e.g. 5 days, then in total about 7L of EBM. This means, you need a cooler box with a capacity of more than 7L, say around 9L to allow space for ice cubes.

Get a good quality cooler box with better insulation and with wheels if possible as stored EBM can be heavy, easily more than 10kg. It is recommended to have 2 cooler boxes, 1 big and 1 small. Use the big box to store frozen EBM at the hotel and for transporting EBM at the end of the trip and the small box for daily use. You can keep the small cooler box in the bigger one but get a much larger cooler box if you plan to do so.