Help! Baby won't drink breastmilk that's been frozen.

emilyerin13 · June 2012

What's up with this? DS is 6 months and has been EBF until about two weeks ago. When I make a bottle for him he'll take a few sips and then turn away and arch his back and get mad. If I make him a formula bottle he'll almost chug it. This same thing happened with DD too. I'm in the process of weaning off the pump due to hellish yeast/blocked duct issues. I have 62 bags of frozen breast milk each containing 4-9 oz. each. I didn't do anything special to the milk before freezing it, just bagged and labeled it. Can I mix it with formula to get him to drink it? With DD I had fewer bags (I think it was 38 or so) and I ended up throwing it all away and I cried the whole time knowing how hard I worked for it.

Ms5586 · June 2012

I don't see why you couldn't mix BM with formula, just use the BM as you would water.

Oh, and if he won't, I would look into donating the frozen milk. I watch Eats on Feets on FB in case anyone in my area needs milk.

reederah · June 2012

We had the same issue... I did notice that the milk smelled soapy so I thought it might be that high lipase issue that some women talk about. Anyway, I ended up throwing out a ton of milk (it's was getting old anyway since DS didn't decide to take a bottle and we started with sippys at 9 months). I decided to scald some of the milk, and put the bags in a larger ziploc freezer bag with baking soda at the bottom of it so no odors or anything would make it taste funny, and I used the milk earlier (so when it was only 1 or 2 months old versus 4-6 months old). That seemed to do the trick because me new stash of milk was fine. Even a few of the bag had milk I was too lazy to scald and those were fine too. I personally think some women's milk just doesn't last as long in the freezer.

My advice is to try the newer milk of your freezer stash and see if he will take it. As for the other milk, I'd probably trash it.

emilyerin13 · June 2012

I wish I'd remembered to ask his pediatrician when I was there on Monday: if I do mix the breast milk when I make a formula bottle will that be too many calories for him? He gets 6 bottles/day with between 6 and 8 oz. Someone mentioned it when I thought about doing this with DD. Just had him weighed for his 6 month appt. and he was 16lbs. 10 oz. which puts him in the 33% and 27 inches for 75% for height. He just started rice cereal about 10 days ago but his only real source of nourishment right now is the bottle (BM and formula).

judahsmommy1 · June 2012

You would prepare the formula as labeled, and then mix it with the breast milk. You wouldn't use the breast milk as water because that would be double the expected calories for a given meal.

emilyerin13 · June 2012

Thank you! I'm going to try this. We just tried to wean him off Prevacid too so I think that's contributing to his grumpiness (and 3 shots). I would have waited to wean off the Prevacid but that would mean spending $104 and I didn't want to delay his 6 month checkup because he'd had a few weight gain issues. Anyway, here we are, back to Prevacid but this time the OTC capsule (broken and sprinkled on rice cereal per his Pedi).

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