When I was at the beginning of my breastfeeding journey, I was seriously so confused about how to store breastmilk.

Killian didn’t latch until he was 4.5 weeks old (I will be doing a blog about my own breastfeeding journey soon) so I pumped every 3 hours and had literally hundreds upon hundreds of ounces in my freezer of breastmilk. I had to google SO much to make sure I was pumping correctly, bagging and labeling them correctly, and then storing them properly as well. So I wanted to make a blog where all the info I learned and have been taught since then was all in one place and easily accessible!

Are you receiving donated milk? All these guidelines apply to you as well, just not the pumping portion!

Making the decision to store your milk.

Sometimes this is a big decision. Do you plan to go back to work and keep breast/body feeding? Are you going to pump while you’re at work? How large of a stash do you want to build before you go? Do you need extra freezer space? Does your baby go to daycare where they need to defrost/properly care for your pumped milk for your baby? Do they understand how to pace feed your baby when they’re getting a bottle? Are you in a good spot mentally to take on the regimen of pumping/storing your milk properly (because it is stressful)?

All of these things (and probably more) need to be carefully thought about. It’s seriously like a full time job when you’re pumping.

pumping.

How are you going to pump? Are you only going to catch the let downs with a haakaa type silicon pump? Or are you going to use an electrical pump like a Medela or Spectrum?

With a haakaa or similar type pump, it uses suction that’s placed on the nipple/areola/surrounding tissue and slowly and gently pulls milk from the ducts. Once your feeding session is over you can pour the milk you’ve expressed into a storage bag (I used the Lansinoh brand, they were nice and sturdy). Label the bag with the date and time (I’ll explain more later 😉).

With an electric pump, it’s similar with pouring your expressed milk into the storage bag and label it.

storage.

Now storing your expressed milk (or expressed milk that was donated to your baby). If you are storing it for a longer period of time it needs to be in a freezer. If it’s freshly pumped milk and you will be using soon, it can be left out at room temperature (77 degrees or colder) for 4 hours. If you’re going to be storing it in the refrigerator, it can be stored (preferably towards the back) for up to 4 days. And in a freezer for 6-12 months ( a deep freezer can be for 12 months). The longer milk is in the freezer, its nutritional value decreases so while it may still be “good” 15 months after expression, it will most likely have lost some of its nutritional value.

pumping is hard.

I pumped exclusively for 4.5 weeks (I’ll go into more detail in my blog about my breastfeeding journey soon), but it was one of the hardest and most mentally challenging experiences I faced. Pumping every 3 hours to make sure my little one had enough to eat was rough.

Feeding him pumped milk, burping him, changing him, then getting him down to nap, only to go pump which included cleaning the bottles and pump supplies, then hooking everything up (including myself), to pumping for 20 min (sometimes longer if I was trying to up my supply). Then storing the milk properly, then cleaning or storing the pump parts. THEN I could finally go take a nap, or shower, or whatever else I had to do in the hour/hour and a half I had left before his next feeding (if he wasn’t cluster feeding otherwise he would immediately wake up once I was done pumping typically).

And trying to figure out how store all the milk, make sure all the bottles and pump parts were clean and sanitized, and Sam was following the first in first out rule while looking at the current time and comparing to the time on the bags he was grabbing from the freezer on LITTLE sleep, was so fucking hard. There were so many moving parts to try and figure out how to store the breastmilk. That I could barely understand the thawing/heating up process.

But that’s a whole ‘nother blog for the future.