Expressing routine at 7 months?

[vvviola]

I've just (re)started expressing - mainly to prepare for returning to university in July and to let DH take the DC out without having to rush back to me for a feed.

Should I express at the same time every evening? Or every other evening? Or is there another routine that works best? At the moment I'm getting about 100ml in about 15 minutes, but the other evening for some reason I struggled to even get 20ml - couldn't figure out why.

My only other experience of regularly expressing was when DC1 was in SCBU and I was expressing every three hours until she was allowed out of the incubator. So regular expressing to build up a store of BM is new to me. On DC2, before now I only expressed a couple of times more to be sure she would take a bottle if necessary than anything else

Thanks!

Really not very experienced in expressing so sorry if I'm talking out of my arse not getting it quite right.

Think its best to stick to the same time every day. Hopefully someone with a bit more knowledge will be along soon.......

Thanks Jilted, that's kind of what I thought - but when I seem to get nothing some evenings & loads on others, I was kind of wondering if I was missing something obvious.

I'm not trained, and like I said I was not very good at expressing but do you think it could be something simple like your baby has drunk more milk some nights than others?

You could be right, or maybe me being a bit tired and dehydrated (she's waking every hour and I'm dreadful at remembering to drink extra water).

Got nearly 100ml this evening again, so I guess I'll keep going with same time every day unless someone comes up with a better idea

Thanks again

I used to express for night feeds so DH could help (we have twins). I used to find I would get a lot more (double) if I expressed in the morning or very late at night. Afternoons and evenings seemed to produce much less milk. I used to do it about 1 hour after the morning feed.

That's interesting ceebeevee, I wonder why that is. Unfortunately with the school run & general chaos in the morning here, morning expressing just isn't an option. But maybe I might try exxpressing just before bed and see if that makes a difference to the amounts I get.