Space Saving Breastmilk Storage

I remember that first day after I had Turbo. The lactation consultant came into my room and said "Well you don't have much to work with, do you?" She went on to tell me that it was OK because the size of your breasts has nothing to do with how much milk you can produce. She also said that when her dad had a dairy farm it was often the cows with the smallest udders that produced the most milk.

Well "Moo moo" I AM that dairy cow.


I had so much milk with her that Hubby and I even had to buy an extra freezer for our garage to store it, and even though I stopped pumping when she was 5 months old, I had enough milk stored up to feed her to 9 months old. We had bottles and bags on trays in the freezer, and would bring in one tray at a time for use. It worked, but it wasn't pretty.

I nurse Snow for all but one of her feedings, and I pump twice a day. Once before going to bed, and then in the morning. With just these two pumpings I average about 20 oz a day, up to 23 oz. That much milk can make storage an issue. This time around, I found this storage solution via Pinterest, and I couldn't believe just how genius it was. I have since made a few adjustments to it, and come up with a few helpful tips.

What you'll need:

• Gift bag (the ones sold in 2 packs in the Target bargain section are perfect. Bonus if you can find them on clearance 2 for $0.30)
• Scissors
• Packing tape

1) Start by opening your bag and cutting a slit about 1/2 inch from the bottom all the way across with cross cuts at the ends.

2) Fold the top up and the bottom down to create your opening for milk

3) Reinforce the top, bottom, and sides with packing tape so that when you pull your bags of milk out, the bag doesn't tear.

 4) Insert bags of milk.

 

You can now pull out the oldest milk first from the bottom, without having to search through bags to find it. Each of these gift bags holds about 20 Lansinoh milk bags with approximately 5 oz each. That's 100 oz in each bag!

Keep the bag in your freezer and add milk to it as you pump.

Try to make sure that each bag is as flat as possible when you add it to your dispenser so that it can be pulled out smoothly.