My toddler’s taking over the whole bed during the night is why we put him out of our bed and into a crib next to our bed once he hit about 18 months old. My patient husband gets tired of being kicked! The last night of our recent vacation, my dear husband wasn’t there so toddler baby got to sleep with me and he pulled the sideways H trick. Go here for some funny sleep positions by a cosleeping dad. It illustrates the position my toddler has in the photo as the “H is for h–” position. Agreed! These positions totally made me laugh! Once a baby gets mobile, I have a hard time sharing a bed with him. So we do the sidecar crib thing. Going on vacation gets tricky because beds condo/hotel beds are usually high and the portable cribs are low.

 

A few weeks ago, the night before our family vacation to Park City, my toddler threw a curve ball at me. A figurative one. This once perfect angel-sleep-through-the-night baby woke up and started crying as if he was in sheer terror. It has been so long since he woke up during the night that I actually didn’t know what to do! I weaned him from night nursing last fall and I guess the instinct to nurse in the night had evaporated from my previously constantly nursing motherly breast, although we “still” nurse during the day. After a minute of offering water and seeing him refuse, and that my talking wasn’t going to calm him, I remembered, oh yeah, why not nurse him? Ahhh, yes, now I could do that and not have to get out of bed. Which is the thing I dread most about being a mom. Getting out of my warm comfy soft bed in the middle of the night to lovingly respond to a sick or frightened child or baby

Since I’m the mom I can decide to “break” the rule of not nursing any more at night. So I nursed him in bed with me which was easy since we have his crib set up next to our bed with the siderail taken off. He quickly fell back asleep and i didn’t hear from him again until morning.

 

The next two nights on our vacation were rough with him waking up on his “bed” of blankets on the floor next to our bed in the condo master suite. I remembered Elizabeth Pantley’s teaching that you should put your baby to bed/sleep in the place you want him to wake up. The previous nights I had been nursing him before he fell asleep in the big king sized bed and then transferring him to the floor. So the next night I lay down with him on the floor and nursed him for our ritual nightly nursing before bed. Notice I didn’t say I nursed him to sleep. That stopped working a long time ago for every night. He has to be really tired for nursing to sleep to work.

I feel bad my first two babies missed out on complete bedsharing with me as babies. Hopefully they are not harboring any resentment deep in their emotional cells about missing mom at night. They were in my room with me though, in a crib or bassinett. I could not leave a baby in a different room at night. I would not be able to fall asleep, not being able to hear or see them! I know that’s what baby monitors are for but to me it’s not the same as close proximity. They survived. Here they are mentoring Grandma about her new smartphone while on vacation.

 

I’ve been able to enjoy some really good sleep as a mom because I bedshare with my babies. It hasn’t always been this way though. I have seven babies and it took me until baby #3 to discover the pleasures of total bedsharing. Then it took until Baby #4 to realize that some babies start waking up night to nurse when they have mom’s breastaurant available 24/7, when they really don’t have a nutritional need to nurse at night. So that’s when Elizabeth Pantley came to the rescue! More on that below.

I started consistently bedsharing with Baby #3, from day one, which was easy since I had a home birth. He slept so well from day one with nursing in bed. It just felt so natural not to separate his body from mine when nighttime came. He was such a cuddly snuggly baby. I only ever had to get out bed with him once for his whole babyhood.

 

My cuddly snuggly 100% bedsharing baby is now quite the comedian.

 

With my older two babies I had the crib in my room and would sometimes bedshare and sometimes put the baby in the crib. For some reason, I felt that would be strange to always have the baby in my bed. But I got over it by Baby #3. Or rather, my body succumbed to the tiredness of getting out of bed to get the baby and sitting up to nurse and then putting the baby back in the bassinett or the crib.

 

 

I know for some moms, bedsharing and nursing in bed seem to make the baby wake up all night. But you can’t know that for sure. Maybe the baby would wake up all night as well in his own room and bed. The perfect book for you to help your baby sleep through the night, without doing CIO (crying it out) or Ferberizing is this one by Elizabeth Pantley, my informal get-through-the-night without-getting-out-of-bed-with-an-older-sleeping-baby mentor.

 

 

This is a terrific book! There is an alternative to letting your baby cry it out or being attached to your baby all night at the breast if you co-sleep. Pantley has done a public service by writing this book and she will forever be a hero in this house! She doesn’t preach and and she writes to all parents, whether you share a bed or not, whether you breastfeed or bottlefeed. An older baby, past nine months or so, can learn to sleep through the night without frequent waking and this book teaches you how. I am also available for mentoring on this topic if you don’t want to read the book. Comment below if interested.

 

 

I prefer to bedshare and I love that she says that that’s OK. You don’t find many books that do that beyond Dr. Sears and Dr. Gordon’s books. Maybe just Dr. McKenna’s book.

 

 

(Dr. McKenna is a Notre Dame Univ. professor who promotes bedsharing and wrote a book about it.) But I found another author…Dia Michels.

Here is a very good, informative powerpoint about the benefits of bedsharing and how to do it, by Dia Michels, a mom, author, and breastfeeding and bedsharing advocate.

 

I love the conclusion:

 

“No one would suggest that because sleeping in a crib can be hazardous under certain conditions, no baby should sleep in a crib. By analogy, therefore, it is equally illogical to suggest that because under certain circumstances bedsharing can be hazardous, parents should not bedshare with their babies. Given the near universality of the practice of bedsharing at some stage, it is far more logical to identify the conditions under which bedsharing is hazardous and to give parents information on how to avoid them.”
-Peter Fleming Ph.D.

“Where Should Babies Sleep At Night? A Review of the Evidence from the CESDI SUDI Study.” Mothering Magazine. Sept/Oct 2002

 

When it comes to sleep, do what is safe and what works for your family. The video I have posted below cites a Milwaukee city ad campaign telling parents not to sleep with their babies, due to recent cases where babies died in parent’s beds. But when you examine the cases closer you find that these babies died because they didn’t have a breastfeeding mom close by in bed with them. Obviously these ads are made by people who don’t have to do deal with little people at night who wake up screaming and crying, disturbing their sleep, who beg you to move out of your bed to play with you, or nurse if you happen to have a soft, lovely, sleep-inducing womanly breast.

But also know that if you have been nursing and bedsharing and your baby wakes up a lot, it might be time to teach your baby that he or she can get back to sleep without a nipple in is or her mouth. That’s what Elizabeth Pantley’s book is for. Thank God for Elizabeth Pantley!

Many mothers find that succumbing to bedsharing allows them to sleep. I suggest you join them if that’s how your baby sleeps best and how you can get back to REM sleep as soon as possible. For me that means not having to get out of bed. When baby gets to toddler age, you can wean from night nursing. You can be an attachment parent without having a nighttime Velcro baby at the breast until he’s 4!

But your baby might still like you to be next to him or her while he or she falls asleep. I have found after I do our routine at night that many times I can be in sight of my toddler while he is in his crib, praying or writing in my journal, and he will peacefully drift off to sleep, knowing I am there.

Dr. McKenna says that breastfeeding is hard to do unless you bedshare. And good news, according the video I posted above, bedsharing is not as safe if you don’t breastfeed. The news reporter says that all the babies in the SIDS cases involved in the story were bottlefed.