The Life of Matthew

The other day Daddy and I were alone in the house and I was obviously going to get hungry. (Mummy says I’m definitely Daddy’s boy because I’m always thinking about food.) We defrosted some of the breast milk that Mummy had pumped and stored for me and then we sat down to a nice meal from the bottle. But NO! It was horrible. Yuk! Yuk! Yuk! It wasn’t because I didn’t like my bottle, I know how to eat from that thank you very much, it was just horrible. At first I just wouldn’t eat anything and then when Daddy finally got a little bit in my mouth I spat it out all over myself again. Poor Daddy just didn’t know what to do. But then, because Daddy is very clever, he started to wonder whether there was something wrong with the milk itself. And there was. Oh boy, there was. Daddy thought it tasted “fishy” and when Mummy came home and tried some she said it tasted like “vomit.” At first I think she didn’t quite believe us because it didn’t really smell bad, but she also spat it out and then ran around the kitchen saying, ‘Yuk! Yuk! Yuk!’So what did we do wrong when we stored the milk? Apparently nothing. We kept it in the appropriate containers specifically designed for storing breast milk and we kept it at the back of the freezer. It hadn’t been there too long, either. So Daddy went to the nice people at Google to see if they had any answers for us. And naturally they did.

It seems that some women have an excess of the enzyme lipase in their breast milk. This is something that breaks down fat. Excess lipase effects the taste but not the nutrients so if Mummy has this problem then it doesn’t do anything to my food. But it does mean that it can’t be stored for very long. Some clever people say that if you scald the milk right after pumping it destroys the excess lipase. But that also takes away some of the nutrients I need. When I had milk that hadn’t been frozen for more than a few days we didn’t have any problems.

Just another exciting thing you have to learn as a new parent.

Until next time, bye bye.