Whether you're storing some milk for a much deserved evening out, or you're going back to work - freezing breastmilk is an excellent way to continue to provide your baby with your own milk. Depending on the freezer you can store your milk for up to 6 months or longer. With this, of course, comes guidelines on how to store your milk and how to heat it back up for baby.

As a general rule milk can be stored at room temperature for 4-6 hours, in a refrigerator for up to 8 days, in a refrigerator freezer for up to 3 months and in a deep chest freezer for up to 6 months or longer. It's very important to remember to chill your breastmilk before freezing it. Do NOT stick it directly into the freezer before it's spent a few hours in the refrigerator.

The kind of storage you use for your milk comes down to how you plan to use it. If it's stored for occasional use, meaning your baby is almost always getting nourishment straight from the breast, then using the plastic storage bags designed for breastmilk storage is fine. If your baby is generally being nursed from a bottle of expressed milk, as in a daycare situation, you may want to use glass bottles, as the live antibodies in breastmilk tend to stick less to the sides of glass then they do to plastic.

Breastmilk storage bags have a tendency to be cumbersome to use. After breastfeeding three daughters for a year each I have spilled my fair share of freshly expressed breastmilk when dumping it into a storage bag. The best method I've found is to put the bag into a bottle and then pour the milk in.

I found the Gerber bags with the ziplock closure to be the best when it came to durability and ease of use. After pouring your milk into a storage bag, take another storage bag and write the date and amount on it. Slip the milk bag into the extra bag and place it in the refrigerator for a few hours. When you're ready for the freezer put it into a ziplock freezer bag. You can add more milk to the freezer bag as you accumulate more.

If you pump more in a single day you can add to your supply. If you already have milk from the same day in the freezer you can chill freshly expressed milk and add it directly to the bag that you've already frozen - this can only be done for same day expressions.

When warming frozen milk there is one major rule - NEVER put in on the stove or in the microwave! Microwaving destroys the antibodies in human milk and that's one of the major reasons for breastfeeding

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