Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Shipping breastmilk

I still have about 160 oz of frozen breastmilk in the freezer. With our pending move, I was prepared to dump whatever Littles didn't drink this week. After all, transporting frozen breastmilk is a huge pain, because it must stay frozen -- if it thaws, it must be used within 24 hours, which would obviously be a problem if it's 160 oz that has thawed. And with Littles moving on to cow's milk and taking less and less breastmilk during the day, it didn't really seem necessary to have breastmilk available in Texas.

So the other day, I told Hubby that I would probably dump my frozen milk before we left California. He said, "Heck no! I've supported your breastfeeding for a year! We are not dumping any milk!"

Sometimes I love my husband :)

I knew that I had two options for getting the milk to Texas: 1) transport it myself when we fly out on Sunday, or 2) ship it ahead of time.

Transporting it myself didn't seem like a good option. After all, that is a lot of milk, and we will have plenty of other things to deal with (Littles, our cat Monessa, etc.) on Sunday.

So I decided to ship it ahead. Since Hubby will be coming home tomorrow night to help with the move, I had to get it off to him today.

It turned out to be fairly easy.

Since all my milk is frozen in glass bottles, I wrapped each bottle in bubble wrap.

I found a small hard-sided cooler in the garage that looked to be the perfect size. (You can also use a styrofoam cooler packaged in a cardboard box, but this site suggests that a hard-sided cooler does a better job of keeping the milk safe.)

I used DryIceDirectory.com to locate a nearby dry ice supplier. This turned out to be an ice cream shop!

I purchased 10 pounds of dry ice, which cost $8.50. This may be overkill, as this site says that you only need 5-9 pounds of dry ice to keep a cooler full of milk frozen, but I figured better safe than sorry.

I split the dry ice into two pieces using a hammer. I wrapped the first piece in packing paper, put it at the bottom of the cooler, and put more packing paper at the bottom of the cooler for additional padding:


Then I put the bubble-wrapped bottles into the cooler:


I wrapped the other half of the dry ice in more packing paper and put that on top. I stuffed packing paper into any holes I could find in order to make sure everything stays nice and secure in transit:


Then I wrapped tape around the cooler a few times to secure the lid in place.

Since dry ice is classified as dangerous goods, I called FedEx to double-check that they would have no problems shipping it. The phone rep sent me a label to place on the cooler to identify it as containing dry ice. I also printed out this flyer to identify the cooler as containing human milk. I edited it to add that it contained glass as well:


Then I headed over to FedEx. I had to make sure I dropped it off at a location that accepts dangerous goods. (You can identify these locations by selecting the "dangerous goods" option under "Filter your search by FedEx services" on the Find FedEx Locations screen.)

I chose the priority overnight option, so the package will arrive by 10:00 AM tomorrow. Again, this is probably overkill -- standard overnight, with a 3:00 PM arrival time, would be fine, but I erred on the side of caution.

The woman asked me if the value was more than $100, and I answered, "No." Although I was thinking in my head, "Well, really, it's priceless..."

The cooler with 17 glass bottles and about 135 oz of milk (I kept some out for Littles to drink during the rest of this week) weighed in at 28 lbs. It cost $175 to ship.

After shipping the cooler, I went to pick up Littles, and found out that she'd been having tummy troubles all day. We're guessing it's from the cow's milk. (Hubby is lactose-intolerant, so this is not a complete surprise.) So now I'm really glad that I went through the trouble of shipping the breastmilk, since it takes a lot of pressure off -- we can take our time with weaning.

Now I just have to cross my fingers and hope all that milk is still frozen when it arrives in Texas tomorrow!

3 comments:

Benny said...

So how did it work out? Next Sunday we're flying to Ft Worth from Orange County, CA and have the same problem with transporting frozen breast milk. FedEx is saying no to it as it's bodily fluid. UPS says OK. But, we're thinking of packing it with ice and taking it on the plane. Thanks.

Unknown said...

We're moving to texas by the 30th of may!! and I'm in the military so I HAVE TO MAKE SURE my milk stays frozen lol thanks for your info. In the book "breastfeeding in combat boots," a military mom shipped her frozen breast milk via the shipping company DHL...just a thought. Thanks again!

Unknown said...

Box Brothers now offers breast-milk shipping services - http://www.prlog.org/11805127-no-cookies-with-this-milk-introducing-breast-milk-shipping-services.html