Babies sleep on and off intermittently throughout the day Risty, so technically they should really have lots of minute doses throughout the day to mimick that.  However, most Doctors don’t advise it because more than likely they feel it will be too much for a parent to administer such.  Just as they feel it is too much to ask a parent to rise at 3am and dose the dose there.  At the end of the day it is with the parent what is besst for their child though, and up to them how they dose the stuff.  A Doctor just advises dosing the meds in waking hours because of convenience.  He advises the 10pm doseing only because they felt it actually suppressed the HPA axis which becomes active at 3am.  However, as you can see from the above, it doesn’t really do a good job of that for most kids and it does it in the wrong way.  Its completel unnatural for a child to have their highest levels of cortisol in deep sleep.  :)

Because babies sleep AND wake a lot during the day, what should be happening is a peak every time they wake and a drop when they sleep, so that amounts to more regular smaller doses that can be high when they are awake and low when asleep after a feed--and if they were small enough, they would mimick this better for babies, but unfortunately as I said Doctors don’t recommend for reasons above.  They have you dose twice a day for convenience only.  But really a minute dose just before each feed would be probably mimicking more of what a tiny baby needs in the way of cortisol when you think about it.  It has to if cortisol is higher when awake and lower when asleep.  Its what the body does.  A baby does a lot of growing in the first two years and when they give two big doses, it is crude and leaves them wide open for high anabolic hormones after 6-8 hours of the day.  I don’t like it anyway.  I would dose a baby exactly as I dose Ashley atleast if I had the time all over again.