Pamela Morrison makes the point that a mother can express throughout the day
and save up enough of her own milk to be fed to the baby by someone else, to
give her a break at night, rather than using a substitute milk.  Certainly
using her own milk is preferable to using anything else, but does this
really get mother more rest?
There was some discussion a while back about milk affecting
wakefulness/sleepiness differently, depending on when it was produced, with
the upshot being that night and evening milk are more conducive to sleep
than morning milk.  Don't know that there is any evidence to support this,
but if it is the case then expressing a load of milk in the morning may not
give the mother the nighttime relief she desires.
All that aside, I have never understood how someone could find it simpler or
less work to express milk throughout the day, particularly by pumping with
all the cleaning that entails, than to simply enjoy one's breaks throughout
the day and let baby come to breast at night.  Generally it is the mother
getting up, warming and feeding the expressed milk at night too, after the
first glow of fatherhood subsides and he starts sleeping through the night
again, usually about two weeks out. By the time baby has finished the bottle
she will need to express milk from her breasts anyway because sitting with
the baby and feeding, even by bottle, will usually elicit some hormonal
response in her and she will be uncomfortable if she tries to go back to sleep. 
I do meet women who launch the idea of pumping during the day to provide a
bottle at night, because they perceive they don't have enough at night but
have an abundance at other times of the day.  IME it reveals a lack of
understanding for the normal, expected behavior of human infants as well as
for the physiology of lactation, and I see it as more worthwhile to discuss
the normalcy of the behavior than to go through these gyrations with
expressing milk when mother is right there in the same room with the baby
all along.  Besides, expressing at a time when she already sees that she has
more than baby takes at a feed, and refraining from feeding or expressing at
the time when she sees there is not enough, will only exacerbate things, as
she will end up with even more of a surplus in the early part of the day,
but no more in the evening, so she may have to continue with this extra work
far longer than it would take to adjust supply by letting the baby feed ad lib.

Rachel Myr
Inherently lazy in Kristiansand, Norway

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