Conventional wisdom has it that breast milk is the best food you can give to your baby. Taken to the extreme, this turns into a serious aversion to artificial baby food. Regardless of what side you land on in the formula debate, if your wife is breastfeeding, you are most likely going to have to make a stash. And this is because it is, at the very least, very practical.

Breastfeeding requires time and energy from your wife and constant proximity to the baby. While nobody could argue that this is bad, it is also true that it is very demanding and sometimes impossible. Things like work, getting sick, and traveling, normal elements of a normal life, can get in the way of breastfeeding. But here is where a breast milk stash comes in.

Imagine you wake up with a fever or with a stomach ache. Or you have to go to the office to work on-site due to an important meeting. Or you have to visit a family member who needs you and lives in a different city. If any of the above happened to your wife, it could mean that she cannot be with your baby for a period of time that, even if short, requires that you feed the baby with a bottle. A breast milk stash allows you to continue feeding your baby breast milk, even if it cannot be directly from your wife.

How do you make a breast milk stash? The bulk of the work must come from your wife, who will have to extract, or less formally, pump, the breast milk. Afterward, you bag it into specially-made plastic bags and put them in the freezer until you need to use it. When the time comes, you thaw it, put it in a bottle, and give it to your baby. Seems simple, and I agree that it is to some extent, but if you are planning to rely on your stash to continue to give breast milk to your baby during a time that your wife and her will not be together, you need to make sure you are planning it.

The determinant factor is, of course, how much milk your wife can extract. The more she can extract, the more you will be able to stash. This is very particular to each person, and I am not sure if there is any way of knowing this apart from actually trying it out and finding out. There is nothing much I could say about this other than pumping was not as easy or enjoyable for my wife, so the less I would ask about this, the better. Fortunately, there are other ways, more logistical, that you can help with.

First, ensure you have the space to freeze and store the breast milk. It depends on your needs and what you want to use the stash for, but you will likely have to stock up a considerable amount, which takes up space. It will most likely not fit in your normal freezer unless you make space for it by temporarily not stocking up on other things you normally stock up on. A good idea to consider, if you have the space in your house, is to get another small freezer only for the breast milk.

Another way to help is by ensuring the breast milk is organized and stays organized by the extraction date. Breast milk can last for a very long time when frozen, but is convenient to consume first the ones that were extracted first. The simplest reason to do this is that you want to make sure that the bags with breast milk extracted the farthest back in time do not go bad by staying forever in the freezer. I also read on social media that breast milk’s composition varies as the baby grows, which seems reasonable and possible. In general, a best practice is trying to feed your baby the extracted breast milk as soon as possible, which means that the older the milk you have, the higher priority it should have to be consumed.

It is important to keep in mind that breast milk can change its flavor and smell over time without necessarily spoiling. We realized this after returning to work when our daughter was spending the day with her grandmother, and she tried to feed her breast milk with a bottle. Our daughter angrily refused the bottle, and when my wife went over to breastfeed her, she noticed the milk had a very intense smell and flavor. After researching online, we found out that some women produce a certain protein that, over time, can have that effect on frozen breast milk. You can find several tips online on reverting that smell and taste. Unfortunately, we do not have any personal experience with those as we did not try them because we made sure to start using the older milk first, and I think our daughter eventually got used to the smell and taste. Sort of like getting used to the taste of aged wine.

The last thing we think could be useful to mention is to make sure you have a fallback plan if your wife is still breastfeeding; she will be away for some time, and you plan to rely completely on your stash. There are many variables at play that need to be accounted for, such as whether you contemplate the possibility of giving your baby formula. But the important thing is that you need to imagine and plan for the alternative scenario where you do not feed your baby breast milk for whatever reason and how the feeding would look like if that happens.

Many things could prevent you from giving the breast milk in your stash to your baby. An example could be that you are too close to the number of ounces that your baby needs for the time that she will be separated from your wife. In this case, let’s say that you inadvertently spill the bottle after thawing and serving it. In this scenario, you are short of a meal so you need to be able to give your baby something different than breast milk. 

Another possible example is the freezer where you keep the breast milk breaks down. This happened to us, but luckily, weeks after we had already used our stash, and when my wife had stopped breastfeeding. Our freezer broke down, and we did not realize it until the next day when we opened it to get the food we would serve for lunch. Our regular food was still somewhat frozen, and we could save everything, but if the breast milk from our stash had been there, it would have thawed. We would have had to use it in the next twenty-four hours, which most advise as the window of time before you need to use the breast milk (if thawed in the refrigerator). And I am sure it would have thawed because you save breast milk in separate bags and for a relatively small amount, making it quick to defrost.

Our fallback plan was formula since we did contemplate the possibility of feeding it to our baby, and we have done so after breastfeeding stopped. This was very useful because when my wife had to travel out of town for a weekend, leaving on Friday and coming back on Sunday, I already had the formula cans at home and everything else I needed. That Saturday I realized that we had miscalculated the total number of ounces that we would need, so I had to mix the breast milk with formula to make sure that we made it until my wife’s return. I decided to mix the breast milk with the formula (two parts of breast milk for a part of formula) because my daughter was still not completely used to the formula’s flavor, and mixing the two ensured she took the bottle without problems.

Hopefully, after reading this, you will have a clearer picture of all the variables and elements to consider and account for when creating and using a stash of breast milk. In the end, what I think is best is to focus the stash as a means to prolong a little bit more your baby’s stage where she eats and benefits from the advantages of breast milk. But you need to be able to go on to the next stage as soon as needed, even if it is before what you imagined.