Supply, engorgement, and SSTN

[Kirsten~]

So my LO is 3 months on Friday, and I have been back at work for about a month. I was pumping 3 times a day, but I've been having more days where I can only get in 2 times a day. Twice a day doesn't seem to be too much of an issue since she has pretty much gone to eating every 4 hours, but I'm still trying for 3x to keep my supply up and maybe even build up a little stash. I'm worried about relying on pumping causing my supply to drop.

Here's the thing, I recently dropped the DF to see how she would do. I got really sick of pumping a 4th time for the DF. Since I dropped the DF, she only wakes up once at a night at 2:30. At the NW, she is only taking from one side, and she is not nursing for very long (7-9 mins). After that, she's been going back down till 6-6:30. The problem is the side that she doesn't take from is engorged (obviously) by the morning since it'd been 12 hours with no relief.
I'm feeling this torn feeling between pumping more (say before I go to bed) to help a little with the engorgement, but also not wanting to make it worse by triggering my body to make more milk. Her NW is such a short nursing session that I'm almost wondering if she's not far off from STTN completely, in which case then I'm going to be a wreck on both sides. Basically, I want to keep a nice, steady supply during the day, but have it not be so much at night!

Any ideas on what would be best? Or does the morning engorgement just start to level out soon? And if I end up less engorged, is that going to kill my daytime supply? 

[Erin M]

Your supply eventually will level out so I wouldn't worry about that.  If you need to pump to relieve it, just pump enough to relieve the engorgement though as an "empty" breast sends a signal to your body to make more milk. 

A few thoughts:
- you've got a 4 month growth spurt on the horizon which is probably going to throw off whatever routine you've gotten into as far as night feeds go
- at 3 months I'd probably say that 5 feeds per 24 hours is a minimum so if you drop the df you may have a nf for a bit still (which is fine, lots of moms prefer to go to sleep earlier and just deal with the nf) -- at 3 months 2 out of my 3 had a df and a nf (one had a df and multiple nfs) -- but my third was good with just the df from about 12 weeks on so that's possible too!