Smiling in the Dark

All the baby books agree - at nighttime, when feeding your baby, don't get them all excited by interacting with them. Keep the lights low, keep talking and eye contact to a minimum. In this way the baby will get the message that daytime is fun whereas nighttime is well, a bit dull and they'd be better off sleeping through it.

I agree with this. The middle of the night is not the time to be showing off the new mobile/squeaky toy, or dancing about to music. I've stuck to the advice. My son is coming up for seven weeks old now and I'm impressed that he can really tell the difference between night and day. In the daytime he will feed and then get all alert - smiling, cooing, thrashing arms and legs about and gazing at anything interesting (although my black and white dressing gown often seems as interesting as my face, which is a bit disheartening, my moisturiser is evidently not doing it's job...). At night, though, he will feed and then drift off back to sleep, for an average total of about 12 hours (I, of course, only get my sleep in the three- or four-hour blocks between feeds but still...).

But the last few nights, although he has continued to stay sleepy and relaxed, he has begun to smile at me when I take him into the next room for a feed. A huge, beaming, happy smile. The first night I responded (it's very hard not to smile back at a smiling baby), although I was a bit tentative, thinking he might take this as a signal to wake up fully. But he didn't. His body clock is better than I gave him credit for.

So now, as my reward for getting up for nighttime feeds, we smile in the dark.