Pumping Challenges: Supply - Ixelle

This seems to be something that weighs heavily on every pumping mom's mind. We all live in constant fear of losing our supply.
Sometime around the 5 week mark I freaked out about not losing weight, and started exercising. This apparently was way too early for my body, and between not wanting to eat, stressing about other issues and my exercise regime, my supply dropped to where I wasn't making enough for Thumper, and we had to start burning through the small freezer stash I had built up. Once that happened I had to really start making sure I got enough calories in a day, I started drinking Mothers' Milk Tea, eating oatmeal religiously every day and power pumping when I felt up to it. I basically pumped every 2 hours instead of every 3 hours for a full day. I didn't see results from this until 3-4 days later.
It took about a week and a half but my supply thankfully built back up without needing to supplement with formula (barely). I'm still in the process of finding that balance between diet, exercise and lactating. It's hard when your body isn't really your own.

Fast forward 3 months, I started having to deal with an oversupply. This involved having to get real creative with freezer space and even talking about buying a chest freezer which we couldn't really afford. I didn't want to rotate my freezer stash because I wanted Thumper to get the freshest milk possible for as long as possible, and so even with providing everything he was eating in a day, I was also freezing an extra 16-20 oz. This was when I decided to donate milk (I'll write later about this!) and once again, it was kind of a leap of faith since there are no guarantees about my supply in the future, it would be terrible to have donated milk that I would later need. And yes, even so much extra I was still in constant fear of my supply dropping, especially with people telling me about the unexplained drop in supply that is supposed to happen at 6 months. This was also when I started looking around for information and resources on EPing online to see if I really needed to be worried about my supply dropping at 6 months (I'm at 4+ months now, so maybe in a few months I'll be writing a post about that). After a little research and some personal stories from some awesome fellow pumping moms, I decided to try dropping from pumping every 3 hours to every 4 hours (which went very well) and then dropping one of my pumps altogether, so I would have one 8-hour stretch between pumps every day and would be pumping 5 times in a day. This is where I'm currently at and my body is still adjusting to this new schedule, I may have to tweak this schedule a little. I'm freezing much less milk daily, and have had a few plugged ducts (ouch) that I'm working with, but that is another struggle for another time!