12 week old dropped from 91st to 25th percentile... sleeps through. Should I wake to feed?

[flossyflo]

DD has been sleeping for 7-8 hours most nights since about week 9. Lucky me. But am starting to get a bit worried about her weight gain. She was hovering around the 50th percentile after her birth weight was on the 91st and since this increased sleeping at night has dropped again to just above 25th. She is still putting on weight but only 2oz last week and now weighs 11 lbs 12 ozs at 12 weeks. She is generally a happy little thing, and feeds pretty well in the day and can go about 2 - 3 hours between feeds although I usually take any opportunity to get her on the boob. Oh should have said she is EBF. Hv didn't seem too worried at baby clinic. She doesn't wake up at night but does furiously suck her thumb and kick her legs. Should I use this opportunity to wake her up and feed or just thank my lucky stars that she is sleeping well at the moment and forget about growth chart?

Don't wake her up at the moment but see you it goes. It she continues to steadily drop I would think about it, but not yet.
Congrats on all the sleep (v jealous)

Let her/encourage her to bf as long and as often as possible during her waking ours and ALWAYS offer both breasts at each feed. Then you should be able to avoid introducing formula. If she continues to lose you may have hv suggesting formula to bulk up her intake and that is a slippery slope! Very jealous of all your sleep too of course!

When is the last feed? You could see if she would have a dream feed about 10pm or 2am or feed through the evening. Or express in the day and give a dream feed by bottle.

Growth is really important for physical and mental development. She's still really young so a bit more broken sleep might be in order... Sorry. Have you had your latch checked by a IBCLC?

We introduced a middle of the night feed when our dd was that age. (For slightly different reasons though - she was only dropping slightly on the weight percentiles but wasn't settled during the day and we were stuck in a 'snack and snooze' vicious cycle where she never really fed well or slept well.)
Anyway, back to my point: we set the alarm for 4am and she took a really good, calm, sleepy feed and usually settled back to sleep very well afterwards. It was a killer, but we only did it for a few weeks and it seemed to really help. I've also read that breast milk is richer at night time so this might help your dd's weight gain.
Oh, and very importantly it didn't become a habit for dd- when we stopped setting the alarm she went back to sleeping through again.

If the hv said she is fine then don't stress yourself about it.

As I understand it the ONLY time you should be massively concerned is if they drop off the lines entirely.

In which case I'm sure your hv/gp will be able to help and give good advice.

Some really good advice on here already, including don't be too concerned and offer both breasts at least once during each feed.

There is some good information on increasing your baby's weight gain on kellymom.

Whilst I agree that you needn't worry, it might be worth going along to a local bfing support group and asking them to observe a complete feed and check Lo for tongue tie and to check your latch. There are some useful videos on latch here

When my DDs weight gain was slow, fed her every 2 hours in the day and used breast compressions. Might be something to try