Hi all, I'm looking for some advice.
I have to attend a funeral on Friday this week, about 7 hours travel from home. I will be leaving on Thursday lunchtime and the funeral is Friday 11 until I imagine 2.30/3 ish with wake. The funeral is no children so DD (5 months) will be looked after by a relative. She lives about 30 minutes drive from where the funeral is. I might be away for 5 hours total.
I need to leave enough expressed milk for her with my relative. She is demand-fed and not on any kind of predictable schedule so it is difficult to know how much she will take- I'm thinking to leave about 8-10oz just in case.
There's obviously no way I can express that much on the morning of the funeral- I usually only get 2-3 oz when expressing in addition to feeds and sometimes not that, so that's about 3-4 days worth of expressing. I don't really keep a stash. I've got a couple of options for transporting and storing the milk I think? Which would be best?
- Freeze milk I express between now and Wednesday evening, pack it in a cool pack with an ice pack, where hopefully it will defrost really slowly. Put in fridge when I arrive and use the next day. My issue with this is that the BFN guidance says defrosted milk can only be stored for 24 hours- is this from when totally defrosted or from when you start to defrost? It will be out of the fridge for some of this time on the Friday as well as DD has to be taken to my relative's etc.
- It seems like milk has a longer life if not frozen so I could just chill in fridge as normal and bring the milk in a cool pack. However, it always seems to go off at about 4 days with me, so this would be pushing it a bit?
Would option 1 be ok do you think? I am probably overthinking this but am a bit nervous at leaving her anyway (she doesn't even take well to DP flying solo with her).
Thanks in advance!