Traveling With Our Stash

We've flown a few times with donated breast milk in order to visit our relatives in Vancouver. Next week, we'll be attempting something rather more challenging. A mission in the Apollo Program comes to mind - we need to pack necessities to support life far from home and we'll be depending on technology to make it all work out. I can see the worried look on Tom Hanks' face: "The freezer appears to be... offline."

Joking aside, we haven't yet figured out what to do to secure baby Jacob's milk. We will stay in Toronto for four days with my brother while Ian, my partner, does a bit of work in town. Then it is on to Halifax. Our flight is late in the evening, and we'll stay in a hotel near the airport upon our arrival. The next day, Ian's birth mother will pick us up and drive us to her home near Lunenberg, a two-hour trip.

All this is to say that we need to pack our cooler of human milk so that it will stay completely frozen on a potentially very hot summer's evening, overnight, and well into the following day. We will take our most densely-stored milk and try to have as little air space around it as possible. We'll carefully tape the seams of the cooler. Best of all would be to ensure that at the beginning of our trip to Halifax, the milk is as cold as possible. Unfortunately, my brother in Toronto has a small freezer on top of his refrigerator, not a deep freezer capable of going down to a lower temperature.

Thus we find ourselves using the internet and Facebook not just for finding donated milk, but also for helping us store it during our stay in Toronto. Someone in Toronto must have space in a deep freezer they'd be willing to share! I've put out a call on my personal Facebook page as well as Emma Kwasnica's worldwide group, Informed Choice: Birth and Beyond. Hopefully, someone will come to our rescue - Kevin Bacon, maybe?