One of the side effects of baby illnesses apart from the nightmare of having to nurse cranky kids back to health is that they get used to sleeping on our bed. During their last battle with the viruses, we let them sleep on our bed so that we could make sure they were getting enough oxygen through the night.
I’ll say right off the bat that co-sleeping is a topic that’s too huge to talk about here but the key thing to note is while I agree that there’s something wonderfully intoxicating about snuggling up next to soft, juicy baby skin, we don’t do it. The reasons are threefold.
1. Babies are space hogs.
No, I’m not referring to the pigs we sent to Mars. But if you’ve ever slept next to a baby, you’d realize that it was probably the worst sleep in your life. After reading all those articles on SIDS, you’re terrified of suffocating them with your large ass so you move as close to the edge as possible without falling off. And you think they’d reciprocate the favor, but no, they somehow manage to fall asleep perpendicular to your body, right smack in the middle of the bed.
2. It’s a suicidal precedence to set if you plan to have more than one baby.
It’s ok if you have just one kid who turns out to be a straight-sleeper, but it’s physically impossible to put 5 kids and 2 adults on any bed for an entire night. Right now, we’re already struggling with 2 babies fighting us for pillow space. Also, you don’t want to explain to your first kid that he’s being banished to his own bed in order to make room for the new baby.
3. They’re the sex police.
Trust me, there will be no sexytime with a baby sleeping on the same bed. They have an instinct for this kind of thing and you certainly don’t want to spend all that money on therapy after they see daddy and mommy going at it like wild bunnies. It’s proving to be tricky enough to find time for that boom-chica-wow-wow with 2 kids in the same house, much less on the same bed.
So, back to the topic at hand. Ever since the kids tasted the awesomeness of sleeping on our bed, they’ve been hooked. Tru wakes up at 1am every night screaming for “mommy’s pillow”. Not for mommy, just my pillow. Even if I sit beside him on his bed, he’s inconsolable, right until his head touches my bed, and he goes right back to sleep without even so much as another whimper. And the whole racket obviously wakes Kirsten up, who also demands to sleep on our bed as well.
I know there’s magic fairy dust on mommy’s bed. I used to feel safest on my parents’ bed. Like nothing can touch me, not even the scariest monsters in the world. They were all hiding under my bed, but momma’s bed, it was safe.
That’s why we’re torn. We love having the kids on our bed as much as they love being on our bed. But my back doesn’t like it so much because even prisons don’t make you sleep on a 50cm strip of bed space. I wake up every morning feeling and looking like those chinese vampires that hop around with both arms outstretched. Seriously, it’s not pretty.
9 Comments
Haha maybe u need to invest in an inflatable mattress!
I heard it’s really comfortable ;)
we solved this problem (ish) by basically adding more and more beds right next to ours. So, instead of making them shift out of our bed, we elongated it sideways and everybody slept on OUR bed. It works okay, just gotta be a little bit more imaginative about the “boom chica wow wow”
.-= jacqueline´s last blog ..[G’s sketches] =-.
@jacqueline, Oh Actually the thing is they sleep in their own room all this while, Tru has done it for about a year and Kirsten the past month or so. So no beds beside ours because we’ve taken great pains to transit them to their own room!
@VeR, as in what? sleep on the floor with a huge mattress??
My boy kept waking up at 4 months old, so I gave up and let him co-sleep with us. After he started crawling, we removed the bed and slept with only the huge mattress on the floor. Recently, we got him a Twin mattress placed beside our mattress. In the meantime, he still loves snuggling with me, even if that means digging his head under my armpit (like now!)
.-= MieVee @ MummysReviews.com´s last blog ..New Winners of Giveaway #3: Naforye Bibs by PrettyMums.com =-.
@MieVee @ MummysReviews.com, you guys are the best mothers in the world. For me, my bed is MINE – no sharing!
For me I’m already *separated* from the hubby – he sleeps in our bed alone in the masterbedroom (‘i need to work so can’t be awoke by cries’) and I’m squashed in another room with twins – with 3 mattresses on the floor. We decided on mattresses when they are old enough to climb out of their sleep-playpens… on the floor they can roll to any corner of the room for all i care. We always end up on a different mattress in the morning (yes me a space hog too). And thank goodness they don’t have a habit to snuggle up to me, nor i to them.
@leslie, Wow, maybe you should consider carpetting your floor or putting those baby alphabet foam mats across the ENTIRE room. That way they its completely padded and safe.
My ideal room for kids is completely lined with the material they use at ExplorerKid @ Downtown east for the walls and floor. Hard to describe, you’ll know what I’m referring to if you’ve been there before. Firm but sufficiently bouncy to cushion hard knocks, and looks easy to wash as well. Amazing!
[…] the last time they were sick, the kids have been waking up several times every night, wanting to migrate to our bed. We thought it was a phase that would pass on its own, but […]