You can buy special nursing shirts and nightwear that have strategically placed slits and flaps that give you fast access to your nursing bra, making breast-feeding ultra-convenient. Although nursing clothes make breast-feeding easy, they're not essential. A button-down blouse, stretchy T-shirt or sweater, and two-piece pajamas--in other words, your regular clothes--can work just as well. Regular clothes can be even more discreet, if that's important to you. Because of their front flaps, which consist of two extra pieces of fabric, nursing shirts tend to advertise the fact that you're nursing, although no one, except other mothers, may notice.

The newest generation of nursing wear--clingy tank tops and T-shirts--have a built-in nursing bra so you don't have to wear both a nursing bra and a nursing top. Still, like traditional "nursing" shirts, they're an added expense, and their life span tends to be brief. Many moms, especially those who plan to breast-feed for a while, abandon the nursing duds in short order and breast-feed in whatever they throw on that day.