Keri's Milk Donation

by Keri

My name is Keri and I'm a 34 year old mama, massage therapist and breast milk donor.

My baby, Evan, was only 7 weeks old when I first learned about donating breast milk from my twin sister Alice. I thought, "Who knew you could donate breast milk and why would you want to?"

When Alice's son, Shad, was 4 months old she figured out that he had a problem digesting the wheat and dairy in her diet. Once she stopped eating the wheat and dairy his constant "spitting up" stopped too.

With this new information about her milk she realized that she couldn't keep all the pumped milk she had stored in her freezer. The milk was still perfectly good, but just not for her baby. The idea of "throwing out all that milk", made us both sick.

This is when her investigation began and she found South Coast Mother's Milk Bank in Irvine, CA.

Although my son was fine with my milk, I realized I had a freezer full of milk too. I had been pumping since he was about 3 weeks old and stock piling my "extra milk" in the freezer.

Our situation is a bit unique in the fact that on the days I work my sister watches my son and on the days she works I watch her son. On those days we breast feed each others babies.

This along with my already abundant supply created a lot of excess milk. There's no way I'd ever be able to use all the milk that I'd pumped. So, when my sister decided to become a donor so did I.

This was a wonderful thing for both me and sick babies. In addition to initially giving all that I had in my freezer I now pump daily for the milk bank too.

Now that I'm a Mama, I feel like my heart has doubled in size. I see how strong and full of life my son is and I wish that for every baby.

When I'm pumping, sometimes I sit and wonder about the NICU babies who have a chance to live and thrive because of Evan's milk.

I wish I could meet those babies and families and give them all my love as well as my milk.

After becoming breast milk donors and loving it, my sister and I felt like we could do even more and in the Fall of 2006 we are opening our own milk bank in Seal Beach, CA called Milkin' Mamas.