15 Jul 2012

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?



6 comments:

  1. Could you pack 2 coolers? One for your stay in Toronto and a 'deep freeze' cooler with dry ice in it? I have camped in the desert with fresh food for a week before. The food for later in the week was kept sealed in a cooler with dry ice until we were ready to use it. In the States you can travel with limited amounts of dry ice. ( http://www.delta.com/traveling_checkin/baggage/dangerous_goods/index.jsp#ice ) Dry ice is pretty easy to get and not expensive. Good Luck!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm a doula and midwifery student in Toronto - I'll post it to our facebook group and see if we can find someone with a freezer to help you out!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Just thought: this is precisely the sort of thing that the Yarn Harlot is good at (yarnharlot.ca, @yarnharlot). She's a former doula in Toronto.

    ReplyDelete
  4. You’ve got some interesting points in this article. I would have never considered any of these if I didn’t come across this. Thanks!. Pacotes de viagem

    ReplyDelete
  5. We write papers for students and all have struggled under immense pressure to complete our essays and meet the specified deadlines but somewhere along the line,we have failed to do it perfectly and that has adversely affected our grades at school.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I like this post, guys! But also I like the way this guy's writing the essay and homework! If you necessity some help, you can be not shy and text to them directly! Just write to them write my master's thesis for me and be free! Check this residency statement out and enjoy, my friends! Enjoy!

    ReplyDelete