Just like many other moms, you might be planning to go back to work after a while. These times spent at home with your baby might be great to start storing some of your precious milk for your baby. Luckily, there are electrical pumps and manual pumps for this purpose. And if you’re in a tight corner, you may even hand express your milk.
Are you wandering whether you could keep your precious milk healthy and good? Good news is that you may store your milk for 6 months in deep freezers in commercially available storage bags or sterilized containers without losing its nutritional value. After expressing milk, just close the bag/container tightly and note the date with a special pen that writes on glass. For practical reasons, you may also note the expressed amount on the label. Expressed milks can be stored in the fridge for 24 hours and for 1 hour at ambient temperature (unless it is a very hot summer day).
Frosted breast milk should not be heated in a pot or in the microwave. Microwave may destroy the protein and vitamin structure of the milk and it may be exposed to radiation even if not radially.
After the breast milk out of the freezer, let it thaw for a few hours at room temperature. Later on, you should warm it with ben-marie method; placing the container containing the milk in warm water. When the temperature is right, you may feed your baby with it.
If your baby couldn’t finish milk you don’t want to waste the milk left in the feeding bottle, you may keep it in the fridge for a short time, only for once and re-heat it within maximum half an hour-one hour and give it to the baby. However, keep in mind that this is not recommended. It is not really appropriate to store the remaining breast and feed it to your baby again. Also, it is definitely not advised to re-freeze it, it’d be unhealthy. Always go for the fresh milk and it’ll do good to your lovely baby.
Storing and warming the breast milk
Storing and warming the milk after pumping is a delicate issue. Staff Physician Anıl Yeşildal explained how these processes should be carried out under healthy conditions