Something I did not expect when I made the decision to tandem nurse is that I might be blessed with a serious milk oversupply. Nursing around the clock after Addie was born seemed to convince my body that I needed to make all the milk, literally. I faced lots of breastfeeding challenges when Lincoln was a baby, so my easy journey this time was a welcome relief. Even the milk protein sensitivity wasn't enough to dispel my joy of nursing.
Except, I still had a whole lot of extra milk. And, before Addie quit sleeping through the night, I had to get up in the middle of the night and pump - sometimes more than once. I built up a great freezer stash of milk, and I also built a huge pile of dirty bottles and breast pump parts. HUGE. I wasn't great at rinsing parts at 2:30am, so each morning I would wake to find containers filled with breastmilk residue on my bathroom sink, or my nightstand, or the floor. Lovely, right?
After a day or two of piled-up bottles and flanges and membranes, I would finally throw everything in the dishwasher and call it good. But, breastmilk has this funny tendency to leave a filmy residue on everything it touches. So after all the pieces came out of the dishwasher, they looked kind of like this:
I tried everything: endless rinsing, scrubbing, hot water, cold water, different kinds of soap. Nothing helped. So I was excited when I saw that Medela had developed a product specifically to fix this problem: Quick Clean Breastmilk Removal Soap.
When I received the soap, I was not pumping quite as much because Addie was nursing all night again. But I gathered up all of those filmy bottles and decided to give this stuff a try.
It's easy to use - just fill the sink with enough lukewarm water to cover everything and add soap (3 pumps for every gallon of water). Let everything soak for five minutes, then rinse thoroughly and air dry.
I dumped everything in the sink and sat back to watch. The soap is designed to work on residue up to 3 days old. Well, here's the thing - a lot of my residue was a lot older than that. We're talking weeks older than that. So I wasn't sure if it would work! The soap specifically breaks down the proteins and fats in breastmilk to restore bottles and pump parts to their original state. But, my question was - would it work on my really, really old residue?
For good measure, I let everything soak longer than five minutes. I figured it couldn't hurt! Since this no-scrub soap hypoallergenic and contains no added fragrance or taste that might discourage baby from breastfeeding, I gave it all a good long soak before I took everything out to dry.
You can see the results that I got. There is a definite improvement in the level of filminess on these bottles - even after they sat for weeks in my cabinet. Are they spotless? No. But that's my own fault for not trying the soap while I was pumping all the time! I so wish I had known about it then.
Overall, I've definitely been pleased with this soap and you can bet that it will be used from now on when I pump. I appreciate the three-day window provided for cleaning. Most mamas have enough to deal with, without having to worry about getting their sink cleared within a few hours!
Thanks to Medela for providing my review sample. I received no other compensation and all views expressed are my own. For more info, you can read my Disclosure Policy.
No comments:
Post a Comment