Stories of Mrs. S: Breastmilk storage

As a working breastfeeding mom who pumps, there a lot of things we need to consider in milk storage like how we store, how much we store, how to maintain an inventory etc, etc. It can get overwhelming at first but you'll get the hang of it.

The most important step to make sure that your child gets purely breast milk throughout your breastfeeding days is to build your milk stash. I started pumping after my baby's first month. Between my colicky baby and learning the ropes of motherhood, adding this other task was too much for me. Things got better after 30 days and I decided to start building my milk stash.

In between feedings, I would wait about 30 minutes and pump. I would do this about 2-3 times a day and then once at night. I didn't have a whole lot of milk supply. Sometimes I get too tired and miss out on pumping. At the end of my maternity leave, I think I was able to store 5 days worth of milk for feeding my baby while I was away from work.

The next thing is to teach your baby's caregiver about storage rules. I printed out a guide and posted it on the fridge door. I was so lucky to have my mom help me out the first few months and that our helper was easy to teach.

You can use this table from Kellymom.com. It provides a good summary on how to handle you breastmilk from freshly pumped to frozen milk.

Below is a picture of all the things I use when storing my milk. See, I didn't have a huge freezer. I had allotted about half of the freezer space for frozen milk. Slowly, as my baby got older, the allotted space got smaller and smaller as I was only freezing milk that I pumped during the weekends. The milk I pump at work is stored in the chiller and is fed to the baby the next day. The milk I store and freeze during the weekend is consumed every Monday or whenever my work week starts.

I use the follow for my storage:

1. Playtex bottle liners (8 ml) - available at the mall

2. Plastic sealer

3. Pen for labelling

4. Pen and paper for easier inventory

5. Alcohol

6. Resealable plastic bags

I use bottle liners to store the milk as I thought it was the most cost efficient way to do it. Reseable milk bags can cost around 10 pesos a piece. Whereas one liner will cost about 3 pesos each. A box of liners will contain 100 pieces. All you need to do is buy (or borrow) a plastic sealer. I was able to buy mine at Office Depot for Php 700+ and used it for more than one year.

What I do is I fill one liner with milk equivalent to one feeding and then seal it. The most I would fill the bag was 4 ml. I just find it easier to seal the 8ml liners since it was only half way full. I had an issue before when I was using the 4ml liners and milk tends to spill and we want to avoid that. Do not forget to label the bag with the date and time you pumped the milk so you know until when you can use. This becomes important if you do have a lot of milk supply and do not get to use everything you've pumped (lucky you!). Some moms donate the older milk to milk banks so nothing is wasted.

Plastic sealer (Php 700++)

Using the 8 ml liners allows me to lay the milk (as on the picture below) on the freezer "floor". It then takes only 2-3 hours to freeze it. Then I store them standing up to save freezer space. I put the bottle liners with milk inside another resealable bag to avoid contamination in case it touches the food inside the ref. We never had issues with this.

Writing down the amount of milk I pumped and the dates the milk was pumped makes it easier for me to track how much milk I still have in storage. It helps me monitor usage to make sure the oldest ones get used first. It also pushes me to go double time with pumping when we are running low on supply.