Milk Cubes - Why didn't I think of this sooner!?!

I have been very fortunate to be able to exclusively breastfeed both my babies.  It's been, and continues to be, amazing.  Little Smiling Man is seven months old today, and is therefore also about a month into experiencing solids.  Well, actually purées, but I digress... So far he's enjoyed cereals, egg yolks and quite an array of vegetables.  He seems pretty enthusiastic about the whole concept!

As many a smart mama will tell you, if you're making puréed baby food for your little angel, freezing it in an ice cube tray is super convenient.  Once frozen, just pop it out and into a freezer bag, label and away you go!  We still use this technique to freeze homemade soups in small portions for Mini Muffin, and with trying to give Little Smiling Man lots of variety, I'm in baby cube making mode!

Since I chose to introduce iron fortified baby cereals, and he's never had formula, our dietitian recommended using "mix with breastmilk", as opposed to "mix with water" cereals.  The mix with water variety are super convenient, but contain several ingredients that formula fed babies would have been exposed to, but breastfed babies would not. So, to keep things simple for their tummies, and to make it easy to identify any potential food intolerance, we use only the mix with breastmilk variety of baby cereal.

Here comes the challenging part: Managing milk inventories to mix cereal.  Breastmilk doesn't keep long in the fridge, and especially in the early days of introducing solids you use so little to mix cereal.  Sometimes we waste pumped milk because we don't use enough.  Sometimes Little Smiling Man nurses so much (e.g. during teething) that I have nothing to spare for cereal.  Sometimes we're busy and finding time to pump is difficult.  Sometimes I have excess supply and pump a whole bottle, so freeze it to avoid wastage.  But, the frozen bag can only be defrosted in its entirety, and so leads to wasted milk in the end since my little guy also refuses the bottle.  All of this to say, we seem to constantly be in a state of having too much or too little breastmilk for mixing cereal.

And so, after two years of freezing cubes of all sorts of things, it suddenly dawned on me... milk cubes!  When I'm able to pump a whole bottle, instead of using a too-big bag, just freeze it in an ice cube tray.  Then, if we're short on milk, I can just take out a single serve cube, defrost, mix, and the wastage is minimal.  Sweet and simple.



Almost ready - defrosting indirectly with hot water

The question I therefore have to ask is....  Why on earth didn't I think of this two years ago!?!?!