Expressing for premature baby

[snowrevolution]

DC3 was born at 26 weeks. She's now 1 month (actual) and gaining weight (now 1.1kg).

I've been expressing milk for her since she was born and it's going well. I express every 3 hours, as advised, and am now getting about 700-800ml every day (a miracle in itself, as I really struggled to establish breastfeeding with DC1 and 2). The only issue is that she only needs about 160ml a day at the moment - my freezer's got a massive backlog!

I'm just wondering if I can temporarily drop one of my night expressing sessions. So between 9pm and 9am I would only express every 4 hours instead of every 3, meaning a total of 7 expressing sessions every day instead of 8.

I'm tired and feeling a bit rundown at the moment, and I think dropping a nighttime session would help. But I only want to do this if it won't jeopardise my supply long term, and if I'll be fairly easily able to ratchet up the sessions when DC3 does need more milk. By my estimates it will be another 6 weeks or so until DC3 reaches 2kg, and even then she will only need around 550ml per day. 6 weeks of more sleep is quite tempting (DC3 will likely be in hospital for another 2 months).

Can anyone advise?

I'm not sure on the empirical evidence of it but I expressed for my preemie and lengthened time between pumps when I had a huge freezer stash without issue. At one point I dropped the middle of the night pump completely until he came home and I wanted to up the supply. And I got way less daily than you did.

Talk to your midwife but anecdotally, it was fine for me.

First off well done your doing amazing! I was told if you push it more than 5-6 hours regularly then your supply may drop. 4 hourly sounds reasonable to me. If you have facebook there is a really good group called exclusively pumping UK mums. They have great tips and advice which I found so useful with my first. You could consider either chest freezing the surplus milk or donating some to others on another page called human milk for human babies uk. Good luck x

I only expressed once during the night, I expressed for three months and it didn't seem to impact my supply.
I was told it was important to express once during the night.
I would catch up on your sleep at the moment.

Four hourly overnight sorry not all day too (oops - hope you didn't get too excited about that)

Brilliant - that's really helpful. Thank you. Sounds like I should be able to cut back a little without it having too much impact on supply long term. I'll give it a go. And will check out the facebook group you recommended @Ohnottheinlaws .