A Little Piece of Helpful Info.

This comes from some e-mails that have been going on between my sister-in-law and some of her friends. It is actually a piece of information I received with the birth of my second chid. I don't know too much about the medical/scientific info. behind it, but it basically consists of the fact that when babies are born, they most often have their days and nights mixed up. Most people know this, especially new moms. We get the joy of experiencing long nights with babies who tend to really enjoy being awake and often crying alot all night long. But what most people don't know and I learned not too long ago, is that babies often have their days and nights mixed up because their "circadian rhythm" is not developed yet. But the good news is that this WILL develop with time, and they will naturally be able to start sleeping more at night and less during the day. It tends to get progressively better starting around 4-6 weeks. SO, don't stress, and until that happens, try to just enjoy those many quiet moments you have during the day while your new one is sleeping so much! I wished that when I had my first baby someone would have told me in those first few weeks that it WILL get better! I realized later that if I had known it would have only been that crazy for the first month of two, I would have been able to cope a lot better. The fact is, we can handle just about anything for a short period of time. But when we don't know if it will ever end, it gets a lot harder to cope. So, remember that each difficult season with children will come to an end at some point, and you WILL make it!

Here's something written about this idea from an article I found on the internet:
"In the first weeks and months, it's too early to expect a young baby to sleep through the night. As tiring as it seems, don't expect infants to pay attention to adult schedules right away. A newborn doesn't know that people sleep when it's dark, and a baby's "circadian rhythm"—the 24-hour internal clock that controls our sleeping and wake patterns—is still developing (McGraw, Hoffman, Harker, & Herman, 1999).

But hang in there! In a few months, babies gradually begin to organize sleeping and waking according to daily cycles of darkness and light. The 24-hour, light-and-dark cycle begins to affect most babies' sleep patterns within the first three months (Louis, Cannard, Bastuji, & Challamel, 1997).

By six months of age, many babies organize their main sleep times in concert with darkness and light. Although babies can vary a great deal, six-month-olds may sleep six hours or more at a time, and most of these longer periods take place at night. Also by six months, your baby will probably wake up fewer times at night (Anders et al., 1999)."