Co-Sleeping

I didn’t choose this co-sleeping arrangement. It chose me. After two long, tiring and uncomfortable weeks its seems to be heading in the direction of becoming permanent, although I still hold out a slither of hope that one day soon the little lady might return to her cot. There have been a few hopeful instances of bedtimes in her cot, always to be followed by several instances back in our bed. But that said, I’ve come to slowly realise that there might actually be something to this co-sleeping thing. Because almost as soon as we’re in bed and all snuggled up, she drifts off to sleep without so much as a peep and easily sleeps through to the morning. Compare this to a night in her cot which usually calls for a feed, lullabies, a lot of crying (on her part), a lot of begging (on my part) and a lot of re-settling, and bed time is usually a pretty stressful event that can easily drag on for an hour or two. I could be more disciplined, I could try harder, longer, persevere, but co-sleeping just seems to make everything so much easier. But im scared that im making a rod for my own back, and I am at conflict with myself because co-sleeping is something that ive never believed in or really agreed with. I have always stoutly believed that children should sleep in their own beds. But as my daughter lays nestled in my chest and I stroke her hair whilst she holds my hand, I can’t deny that this is an arrangement that obviously makes her feel happy, content and secure. Yes, I would like her to sleep in her cot but I no longer feel right forcing her to sleep there when she obviously loves to sleep with Mummy and Daddy. Perhaps we moved her too soon from her moses basket in our room to her cot in the nursery. Maybe she senses that we are so much further away now. Maybe its too quiet without daddy’s snoring. Who knows. So for now we’re learning how to safely co-sleep as a family, and hopefully one day soon the little lady will be ready to return to her big girl bed. But right now, as I lay in bed with my daughter by my side I too feel happy, content and secure and I cant help but feel that life couldn’t be much than this moment.

I would love to hear other parents co-sleeping experiences. Did you always agree with co-sleeping? Did you plan to co-sleep or did you fall into it like we have? What advice do you have on safetly co-sleeping and transitioning children into their own cots/beds when the time is right?

Baby sleeping habits

I’m not sure how it happened. One minute we had a baby that would happily sleep in her cot. One that would self settle. One that had finally started to sleep through the night. Somehow, over the Christmas holidays we have ended up with a lodger in our bed. A grumpy, touchy one at that. One that doesn’t appear to be making plans to leave any time soon. We never saw it coming. We were blindsided. What we thought would be a harmless night or two of bunking in with us after teething appeared to have turned our little lady into a grizzly, clingy baby seems to have turned into a full blown co-sleeping affair. One that I am neither impressed by or very happy about. I feel like I’ve just had the carpet pulled out from under my feet. No sooner had my body started to get used to getting a decent nights sleep has it had to start getting up at all times of the night again. Its feels like jet lag, but without the knowledge that eventually you will get to sleep.

I don’t know how co-sleeping parents do it. I can’t sleep. Not properly anyway. I’m worried that I might squash her, or that she might put her face in a pillow or that she might overheat. Obviously we’re taking precautions to avoid any of these things happening, but I still worry. I thought my sleep was disrupted before when I was getting up once in the night, but this is so much worse. Its worse because we don’t know what is causing the disruption and therefore when it will end. There are so many possibilities, so many variables. Naturally we started out blaming the teething. After three days our thinking progressed to blaming her disrupted routine, and now, one week on we’re starting to wonder (and hope) that it might have something to do with her healthily growing appetite, because we can’t quite face the very real possibility that she might have developed some pretty bad new sleep habits.

You know the situation is dire when your husband is on Google looking for advice and stepping in with new sleep tactics to try. It worked, for about all of 30 minutes. 30 minutes appreciated by me at least. We’ve tried many different tactics to try to get the little lady back into her cot over the last few days, but nothing is sticking. No one method seems to work more than once. It seems that the little madame has developed a definite liking for our bed, which is nowhere as nice as her cot as I’ve tried telling her. I mean, I would sleep in there myself if I could. But it seems she’s made up her mind, she’d much rather bunk in with us than sleep on her own. So until we figure this thing out, it looks like its three in a bed. Lets just hope no one rolls over..

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/treacletart/102523345/”>Christopher_Hawkins</a&gt; via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a&gt; <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>cc</a&gt;