Storing Human Milk

Had a request recently to talk about how I have managed the inventory of human milk in our house. Glad to oblige.

When I was pumping for my first baby, I couldn't keep up with her demand, and the question of managing a freezer stash never arose.

This baby, however, never got into the groove of accepting expressed milk from any device (bottle, cup, spoon etc.). Rather he would wait, sometimes for hours, to nurse directly when I got home. The amount of milk in the freezer grew and grew.

Here's how I managed it.

I was pumping 3 times a day in the beginning, when I still thought that he would eventually get interested in consuming the milk, and regularly bringing home 15-18 ounces of milk. I froze it in 4-5 ounce aliquots in Lansinoh brand storage bags. I tried some other types but settled on these because of the zip top and ease of use. If you click on that hyperlink it will take you to Amazon.com, and that is actually where I purchased them. Best deal I could find and even better with the 'Subscribe and Save' option in which they send you a fixed amount of product on a schedule that you determine all with free shipping and an extra 15% off. Even better, they send a warning email when product is about to ship and if you don't need it you have a couple of days to cancel without penalty.

The bags seem kind of pricey, but it is important to note that regular zipper bags or drop-in bottle liners are not a good choice. They aren't tough enough and may tear. It is still cheaper to use actual milk storage bags than to use artificial milk, and how sad would you be if your hard work and milk were wasted by poor storage?!

Each bag was labeled with date and approximate volume. I lay them flat when they first went into the freezer so that they would freeze nice and flat. The next day when I added more, I would take the now flat, frozen bags and add them to a gallon-sized zipper bag. This helped with cohorting by time, also known as rotating stock. Also kept the bags from diving out of the freezer when someone else opened it.

In the rare instance that one of the frozen bags was needed, we would either let it thaw in the fridge or run warm water over it.

Guidelines are: fresh milk can be refrigerated for 7 days; thawed milk should be used or refrozen within 24 hours; frozen milk will 'keep' in a regular fridge top freezer for 3-6 months; and in a deep freeze for 6-12 months. Milk stored longer in the freezer will likely still be microbially safe (How would it have become contaminated?), but the nutrition breaks down over time, particularly the lipids. Even old frozen human milk has more specific nutrition for human babies than artificial milk.

If you run across an old bag of human milk that you had forgotten, you could put it into smoothies even for older people (children included) who might not accept drinking thawed human milk straight up.

There have been a couple of times when I had as much as 6-7 liters of frozen milk at a time!