Late stage pregnancy is plagued with nights of flipping in the bed trying to make yourself comfortable. Once you have the baby, you are looking forward to that first night when you can again sleep blissfully on your belly. Baby could care less about your returning to restful sleeping patterns.

Although a baby sleeps 14-18 hours per day, do not count on getting 8 hours of that for yourself! You have to add up all of the two to three hour naps to get to that huge eighteen.

For the first few weeks, baby is still demanding food every two to three hours. Now, while you were pregnant, you weren’t eating every two to three hours. Well, maybe during the day, but not while you slept!

So where does baby get this idea? In utero, baby fed through the umbilical cord at will. Since birth, baby has to rely on the contents of his stomach to tide him over. The 2-4 ounces it takes to fill his little stomach will only sustain his massive growing effort for 2-4 hours. Have you noticed a pattern yet?

Breast milk and formula are easy to digest. They break down quickly in the stomach. So baby is ready to chew your arm off in just a few hours.

As he gets a little bigger, so will his stomach. This means more stomach contents that will take longer to break down. Now, he can sleep in 4-6 hour segments with 4-6 ounces of milk. Epiphany strikes: One hour to break down one ounce.

So how do you stretch that 4-6 hours into the fulfilling 8 you so desperately cannot remember? More complex foods. Keep your baby more active during the last stage of wakefulness. He will crank a bit, but that is fine. By supplementing breast milk or formula with single grain cereal, you can change the pattern to one and a half hours per ounce.

Since the food takes longer to break down, he will sleep longer before he wakes up with that ravenous hunger you always associated with professional pie eating champions. At the same time, take you care provider’s advice and sleep when baby sleeps.

That first eight hour night takes a while to get into baby’s sleeping pattern, but when it does, it will be the best night’s sleep you will ever get!