Expressed bottle - affect supply?

[OttersPocket]

My DS is 5.5 weeks and is EBF. For the past few days I've been expressing enough during the day for one evening bottle for DH to give at 11pm (give or take) so that I can go to bed after the previous feed. DS has been sleeping after the bottle feed until 3am giving me much needed 5 hour stretch of sleep!

My question is whether this will negatively effect my supply. It means that there is a 6 hour stretch when I'm not giving milk. My boobs are very very full at 3am but not to the point of being painful and DS doesn't seem to mind.

Now that we've started giving this bottle, does it mean that as long as we now do this everyday my supply will be sufficient? I don't really want to express during this six hour stretch as that means I'd have to wake up and the whole point of the exercise is to get sleep! But I don't want to dry things up that DS might need especially heading into the 6 week growth spurt next week. I'm confused!

We've been doing something similar but with f instead of ebm. Dd is 10.5 weeks and we started to give a small amount of f at 5 weeks and it took a week or so to get her to take it. She now has a full f feed at 10-10.30 everynight and sleeps until around 4/5am. My supply at that time might have dropped but we want this to be a permanent thing so I don't mind. It's been 4 weeks now and I can't say I've noticed any change to the rest of her feeding.

Yes, it will affect supply, but it may well not matter....most women can cope with a gap like this once breastfeeding is going well and there are no supply issues already. You certainly would not dry up.

Thanks guys, I think that it should therefore be okay if this bottle/break in feeds neck ta the norm then.