Monday, March 14, 2011

Dairy Cow Express!

Much like the Pony Express, but with breastmilk.  I've been working at figuring out the logistics of shipping breast milk and it is complicated!  The excess milk is currently in our deep freeze, but we have to figure out getting it packaged so that it will arrive on the west coast still frozen. 

I'm thankful for surrogates, because websites dealing with surrogacy have a fair bit of information on breastmilk shipping.  It looks like the method we are going to try first is a styrofoam cooler lined with aluminum foil filled with the  breastmilk containers (I'm going to select out the ones that are full rather than half way to cut down on the dead space) and then broken up chunks of dry ice.  If there is any space at the top, I'm to fill it with newspaper.  Then the cooler gets packed into a cardboard box and shipped overnight.

Still need to talk to the UPS store to find out what time I should pack it and drop it off to achieve the least "extra" time the milk is out before being overnighted.

Dropping it off at the milk bank is much simpler.  How I wish milk banks had reciprocal arrangements like blood banks so I could donate here and they could extract there!

I'm hoping that only this first time is difficult and then it gets straight forward, because otherwise I can't see myself being able to pull this off going forward.  Particularly during the time that Chiron can't go inside places...

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