If, as a family, you want to take advantage of cord blood or cord tissue services, you need to do some preparations in advance. The most important thing you decide to do private blood cord banking, is to call and make arrangements. A company will send you a collection kit. This collection kit is a small briefcase-sized item that you'll take with you to the hospital for your day of birth. In that collection kit, there is all of the items that are necessary for your healthcare provider to do the collection of the core blood and tissue. The collection kit is an important piece of the process because it is used to send your core blood from the hospital back to the laboratory. It also should provide some type of temperature stability, because exposure to extreme temperatures (such as high heats or low colds) can begin to kill off some of the stem cells. So selecting a collection kit that has temperature stability will help you maximize the stem cell collection that you are hoping to get