The saying goes “you can’t cry over spilt milk” but as any breastfeeding mommy who has every spilt expressed milk will tell you, you can and you probably will. I view expressed breast milk like liquid gold. You can’t just go to the grocery store or Target and pick up more and wasting my expressed milk is a truly traumatic experience for me.
When Honeybun was born, I decided I never wanted my children to have formula. Being a first time nursing mom and having heard many stories of a mother’s milk “just drying up” one day (including my own mom), I became a breast milk hoarder. I had collected and frozen so much milk that our first wedding anniversary gift from my parents was a large chest freezer since my breast milk was taking over our fridge/freezer (Honeybun had joined our family 11 weeks before). I was determined that if my milk dried up, I would still have enough stored up to feed Honeybun to a year (at one point I had well over 200 ounces frozen).
Over the course of nursing three new babies, I’ve come up with a few ways for easily collecting and storing breastmilk. The easiest by far starts a few days after birth for me. I found out with Honeybun that I’m a dripper. As baby nurses on one breast, my milk lets down simultaneously on both breasts but obviously baby can only consume one side at a time, so what’s a savvy mommy to do? Put a bottle under the other nipple and collect the drips. Though Doodle is not yet 3 weeks old, I’ve already collected over 20 ounces of drips which hubby can give him if I decide not to take him to work with me over the summer.
While the “drip method” is great for early collecting, the way I collected so much when Honeybun was a baby was through actual pumping. When Honeybun was 7 weeks old I started back to teaching dance 5 days a week but luckily I was only gone from her 1 afternoon/evening a week long enough that she required a bottle. During my break I would pump and would generally get 4-6 ounces total and she usually only took 3-4 which gave me a small surplus.
I also pumped in the morning which is where most of my stock came from. Sweet, considerate Honeybun slept through the night at 9 weeks old which was wonderful from a sleeping standpoint but left this mommy highly engorged and uncomfortable. So, again being a savvy mommy, rather than waiting for my milk to reregulate, I began pumping. First feed of the morning I would nurse her on one side and used a manual hand pump to express the milk from the other side. In the beginning I was getting as much as 9 ounces from just the one breast each morning. I continued this daily practice until Honeybun was about 10 months old and I realized my milk was not going anywhere plus I had more than enough frozen to feed her to a year if needed.
With Sugarplum I wasn’t so obsessed with hoarding. Even though we had twice as much freezer space as everyone else I knew in Dublin, it still wasn’t enough for the massive stock I’d established with Honeybun. Plus I didn’t have a work permit so wasn’t ever really away from Sugarplum anyways and she took much longer to sleep through the night so I never had the engorgement issue. I did pump while feeding a few times a week, just to have enough for me to go to a dance class or have a night out with hubby but never got an extravagant stock built up.
We will have to see what Doodle requires. At this point I don’t have a job which will take me away from him much but hopefully I’ll be doing something in the fall. I also have a feeling he’ll be sleeping through the night early like Honeybun did and I already wake up engorged some mornings since he only feeds 2 or 3 times a night and is very quick before falling back asleep. Guess I need to start making room in the freezer!
Did you ever donate your milk? There is a fb. Human milk for human babies. My sis in law donated her over stock. I even took some. At first I was not sure about it, but it was easier taking it from her, knowing what a health but she is. I needed it only to go places. Because I stayed home I hardly pumped so it was hard to get any extra. Plus my son fed ever 1.5-2 hours all through the night and day for over a year! To think of pumpung in between was dreadful.
I have hears of milk catcher sacks you can buy for leakage, but I suppose holding up a bottle would work just as well.
I have never donated my milk though I have friends who have both donated and used donated milk. I tend to stop collecting once I’m comfortable with what I have collected for my kids and like them to get as much breastmilk as possible for as long as possible so my hoarding came in very handy when my milk dried up during my last pregnancy and Doodle couldn’t have cow’s milk!
It honestly makes zero sense to store this much milk not just in the sense of whether it’s all used or not. One of the biggest benefits breast milk has over formula is that its composition changes according to the baby’s dietary needs. So since this is the case with breast milk, why on earth should someone have weeks if not months worth of breast milk pumped when baby is a week old stored in the freezer for when the same child is 6 months old? Couldn’t that be in a sense depriving the child of some nutrients in milk while being nursed say today that were absent or in significantly less amounts?
I’m just ending my maternity leave and have may be 5 full days worth of breast milk in the freezer. However, I will also pump at work and nurse when I’m home. I know it won’t make much sense if any at all to make my frozen stash much bigger. Not only is it wasting liquid gold in terms of breast milk, hoping to use months old milk down the road will lack nutrients and therefore not quite give baby as many benefits as possible. As the author said, if you’re going to have this much milk, donate it. Wasting milk that has subpar nutritional content for your baby today because of the reasons stated in this article (or whatever other reason) is borderline “greedy” or at the very least selfish, especially since it could help save lives. This is just my two cents on the matter, though.
Brittney, there are many reasons mommies choose to pump and store milk. In my personal case, have an oversupply so pumping off the extra is a necessity for my child’s health today. And while, yes, I could easily donate the excess (and I have, in fact, donated some of my pumped milk to other babies and mommies in need), I also keep it because even if it is 6 months old, I like to know that my child could continue on breastmilk only should something ever prevent me from being able to breastfeed him/her.
And if in fact older milk does have “subpar nutritional content” and is only useful to the mother’s own baby in that specific time period, then why is donated milk so sought after for premature and sick babies in the NICU? Breastmilk is always better than formula and premature babies are often fed donated milk from a mother whose baby is a year or more.