Ladies, nursing mothers, you work hard for that liquid white gold and you want to store it away for future feelings, maybe when you're dead tired and it's time for your partner to give the baby a bottle (hint, hint, partners). So, what do you use?
Jars are fantastic, but if you're a klutz like me maybe using your sleep-deprived hands to grab a glass container isn't a good idea. Plastic storage containers? Also great, but you might end up buying an ass-ton of them, and not only is that expensive but it takes up a hell of a lot of room. Right, then. Bags it is...and bags it was for me for eleven months of pumping.
ELEVEN MONTHS. My poor boobs.
For eight months I bought so many Lansinoh Breastmilk Storage Bags that I should have bought stock in the damn company. They served me fairly well for a while. The bags are marked for six ounces of breast milk, with spaces to mark the exact volume, date, time, and baby's name. I found the detail of the markings to be nice. When my daughter was in day care, it was nice to have a space for her name. Date and time of day were handy, as I was saving my early morning milk and donating the milk from my late morning and afternoon pumping sessions. The line for exact volume I found to be kind of redundant since I could see how much was in the bag. So, all good right? Sure. If you don't want to freeze your milk.
Should you be fortunate enough to produce enough milk to have a need to freeze and store it for the long term (always follow guidelines, ladies), then you want to find another bag. I found out the hard way that even if you take care to fill the bag only to the recommended level, the slightest knock of the bag against another surface, say the freezer wall or another storage container, will chip the bag. Ahem. Let me clear my throat and say that again. These bags chip WAY too easily. And it's kind of (read: really, seriously) a pain in the ass to thaw out a bag of frozen breast milk in a chipped bag. Mainly because you don't know it's chipped until you see it sitting in a bowl of room-temperature water with a cloud of your liquid white gold swirling around the bottom. Where it isn't supposed to be. Because its supposed to be in the storage bag.
The flimsiness of the bag is a major concern for me, and will be for other nursing mothers that need to freeze their breast milk. These bags are great if you are just going to be refrigerating your milk, but I don't recommend them if you need to freeze. For that, they earn a 4/8 tentacles. Lansinoh Breastmilk Storage Bags can be found at drugstores, discount department stores like Target and Wal-mart, and sites like Amazon for between $6 and $13. Yes, they're cheap, but they're CHEAP. If you know what I mean and I think you do.
Rating: 4/8 tentacles
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