Cost effective ways of storing breastmilk for daycare?
I am off to Uni this year, so I have DS in daycare 2 days a week.
He'll be starting on solids by the time he goes but I'll obviously need to send milk for him too. I'm starting to express so I can freeze my milk but am wondering what the best way to store it is? Are those bags the best way? How do you Mummies do it who send their kiddies to daycare etc?!
Def bags... When u start getting a good stash, bottles take up way too much room and a very expensive way to do it!
When I first started sending my DS at five and a half months I sent three bottles for a five hour period but the bottles only had about 80mls in each. Some days he would have all of it , other days only one bottle. As he got more use to it increased the amount and split into a normal two feed routine.
I use to freeze my milk in 50ml, 100ml quantities when he was little and then eventually around 8mnths I froze in bags of 180mls just cuz that was an average feed and was easier to take out one bag for each bottle required rather than 6 little ones to total the amount I needed!
Swisspers have a great storage bag that are in packets of 20 bags for as little as I think $6 or so? Very reasonably priced! I've seen some for nearly $20!
Happy to answer any questions as DS has been in day care since June last year and I was pumping and sending BM up until Xmas break.
Cost effective ways of storing breastmilk for daycare?
Bags are great and Swisspers are brilliant and cheap. I think I paid $5 for 20 at the pharmacy. So much cheaper than Medela.
I initially made the mistake of freezing the bags upright so all the milk froze at the bottom of the bag. The best way is to lay them flat to freeze them then store them upright once frozen. They take up very little room and you can quickly and easily see the date on them.
I used the Swisspers too - heaps cheaper then all the others, and worked a lot better.
But I must say, sometimes if the bags have been in the deep freezer for a while, they'd get little cracks a so when defrosting they'd need to be in a bowl or a cup or something, so they don't leak everywhere.
Cost effective ways of storing breastmilk for daycare?
I use the 'milk trays'. They're basically like ice cube makers but longer in shapes. And is abt 30ml per stick. The local ABA ladies put me onto them and said to put some sticker on the top and use whiteboard marker to write the date on. When I send it to cc I either put it in the bottle as it is and it's defrosted in the bottle/fridge. Or I just put the sticks in zip lock bags.
Cost effective ways of storing breastmilk for daycare?
I also used trays.. Qubies they are called. Each cube equals 30mls so super easy to measure out portions. Once the tray was frozen, I'd pop them out into a larger container and store in the freezer. Super easy to pop a few cubes into a bag or bottle to take out and much cheaper than using the bags all the time.
I haven't stored milk for a long time, (starting again soon!) but I used to freeze in ice cube trays and then pop out into dated snap lock bags. I'd then take out the required number of cubes for a feed when needed.
Cost effective ways of storing breastmilk for daycare?
I use qubies trays to freeze and then in dated ziplock bags stored in a large containers (to keep ebm together). I typically send 90ml bottles. I may need to top up fresh ebm bottles and adding 30ml at a time works here so I may be slightly over 90ml but DS2 doesn't mind (he's 9mths atm and has 2-3 bottles a day at childcare 7:30am-ish to 5pm-ish)
I loved the bags but they were starting to get expensive. Then I found the Avent re-usable cups. They take up more room than the bags, but you can reuse them over and over so they were way more cost effective.
I used the cups when I was basically pumping what we needed to use, but when I was expressing for the long haul, they were impractical space wise (ie: when you have 50L of boob juice, cups take so much more space than bags!).
But when never had more than 5L at a time, cups were great
Reply With Quote
Registered User
Cost effective ways of storing breastmilk for daycare?
Bookmarks