When my daughter was born she was sent straight to intensive care due to her being only 27 weeks gestation. After a day or so she was transferred to a different hospital, it was there they started discussing her care with my husband and I. It was stressed to me that she needed breast milk, her tiny stomache wouldn't tolerate formula. I had never actually considered breastfeeding. I Found it a bit 'yucky' to be honest. As a young mum and knowing no one who had breastfed it seemed alien to me. I naively assumed she would just go on to formula.

After reading in to expressing, I knew the importance of starting straight away. It had already been 3 days so that coupled with the fact a pump would be the only way to encourage my milk supply, I was in a rush. Id had an emergency c-section and was not up to shopping so I dispatched my father to argos where he picked up the tommee tippee manual breast pump. It cost me £40 which I realise now was expensive, you can pick them up for £15 in various supermarkets but I didn't have the time to shop around and just looked at argos as I had gift cards for there.

The breast pump comes packaged like the rest of the closer to nature range, silver with a mother and baby on the front. It does look very nice and gives a feeling of quality. The breast pump comes with its own microwaveable sterilising container and one closer to nature bottle. You can pump directly into the bottle. So if you only want to express occasional feeds for your baby then this set would be all you needed to get you going.

Personally I found this pump useless. Having never breastfed before I didn't know what I was supposed to do or how fast I was supposed to do it. I found getting the colostorum out was easy enough but after that I could get nothing with this pump. All I ended up with was sore hands. A point to be aware of is that when you first use the pump there is a stopper which you need to pull out. I never knew this and wasted quite alot as it didn't go into the bottle. Luckily at first my daughter was only on 1ml every 2 hours so I had time to build my supply up.

All in all this breast pump was no good for me as I needed something better as I was exclusively expressing rather than breastfeeding, so the pump was the only thing stimulating my milk supply. I ended up purchasing a medela swing which was fantastic. For expressing occasional feeds after your milk supply is established this set would be perfect and all you'd need. I am giving it 3 stars as it does say in the manual that it is suitable for expressing as much as you want and in my opinion it's just not suitable for heavy use.