Wife and husband Lauren and Shaun Carroll are separated by nearly 500 miles.
Both of 7-month-old Alexander's parents are Army veterans, which presents some parenting challenges. Like finding a way to ship 300 ounces of breast milk overnight.
Shaun Carroll says he carefully packed all 300 ounces of his wife's breast milk in a box with dry ice.
And he says he paid $122 for Priority Mail Express one-day delivery through the U.S. Postal Service on July 18. It would never arrive.
The milk needed to get from Fayetteville to Pennsylvania _ where Lauren and baby Alexander are stationed. Lauren is in the U.S. Army Active Guard Reserve, and her husband is in the Army.
Lauren recently had to move away from her husband in Fayetteville to Bristol, Pennsylvania, she said.
Lauren didn't have a place to store her milk until she found a place to live, she said, so Shaun sent the milk in the mail.
"Formula makes him violently ill," Lauren said of her son.
But when Lauren came home on her lunch break to make sure the package got inside and out of the heat, she said it was nowhere to be found.
The tracking information for the package hadn't been updated since the night before, she said, so she contacted USPS.
A Pennsylvania post office called and said the package wasn't delivered, but it wasn't in Fayetteville either, Lauren said.
She called a second time, and she said she was told the package had been found.
"Yay! Except it is in Glendale, California," Lauren said. "How, no one knows, but she (USPS representative) is having them send it back to me in Pennsylvania; hopefully some of the milk is still frozen and I can use it!"
But by the next day, the milk still hadn't arrived, and the tracking information had not been updated.
So Lauren said she called USPS a third time, looking for the package of breast milk.
