Minutes after pulling my daughter out of my uterus, the nurses cleaned her off and laid her gently on my chest.  That’s where it all started to go wrong.  That’s when my daughter realized that her very favorite thing in the world was being up against someone else, and she’s never wanted to change that.

Don’t get me wrong, those 20 minutes of skin to skin time, fresh out of the womb, were the moments I can clearly tell you I fell in love with her.  As she laid on me, her father and I tearfully told her as much about life as we could think of, and prepare her for life with her new family.  Our voices gently eased the transition of being ripped out of her safe, warm, squishy home in to this bright, loud world and we saw her calm and relax while we gave her our thoughts on our life as a family of four.

But I can pinpoint to those moments that my daughter decided that co-sleeping was for her and we would need to adjust.

Co-Sleeping?  We don’t need no stinking co-sleeping!

Co-sleeping wasn’t in our plan.  You see, we had already had a son, two years prior.  We were obviously experts at all facets of parenting because of those two years with this one child.  We would raise our second just like our first (yes, I’m chuckling too).  Our son never really slept with us.  There would be occasional snuggle in the middle of the night for a feeding.  When we went through sleep training with him, I certainly spent hours in his room in the middle of the night, being there with him while he settled, then I would creep back to my bed until his next night wake-up.  But after a few weeks, that was all resolved, and he happily slept in his crib until he was three years old.  THREE YEARS OLD!  Never jumping out of the crib, never protesting the bars.  Just happily sleeping.  Why would we ever expect anything different from our second child?

From the VERY BEGINNING, my daughter slept better when she slept against someone.  She never wanted to be put down.  In the hospital after having her, the nurses would check in on us and never found her in her bassinet, always in my bed with me.  She was happier there.

Naps would frequently have to be spent on me.  If I tried transferring her, she woke up.  And, as a mom to now two children, I cherished that time with her, understanding how frequently it all changes.

She was a frequent feeder, so nights involved a lot of breastfeeding.  And keeping her safely sleeping next to us allowed for more sleep for all of us.  At some point, I was able to get her to bed for longer periods of the night, but ever the persistent one, she started hurtling her crib to get in to bed with us.

We fought it for a while.  Well meaning friends told us we just needed to keep bringing her back to her bed.  We wondered if you could actually wear a path in the floor boards between her room and our room.  Eventually we realized it just wouldn’t work.  None of us were getting enough sleep.  Sometimes friends are wrong.

Once we gave in to co-sleeping, everything started getting better.  Not every night was perfect, but we all started to find our spot (and sometimes that meant the guest room bed).  Sure, we got thrown up on, but we always knew when she was sick.  She and I had this way of snuggling where she would loop her arm in on mine, and sleep on me.  As an adult, I’ve never been much of a snuggler with my husband, but, my daughter decided that would change and I’ve learned to adjust.  Isn’t that a lot of what parenting is?  Adjusting what you used to be?

Co-sleeping Anonymous

It seems as though co-sleeping isn’t widely discussed, as if its a dirty secret of parenting.  When you finally acknowledge to other parents, “My name is Kerri and I let my daughter sleep with us.”  Is there a support group for it?  All parents get to take a little bit of nap in shifts to make up for the lack of sleep they had been getting?

I was talking about it with other parent friends, and once we all had our moment of co-sleeping confession, we started to compare co-sleeping stories.  Like I’ve said, my daughter likes to be up against me, like she’s trying to crawl back in.  I’ve woken up to pictures on social media that my husband has posted of me sleeping (yes, that merits its own discussion) in the tiniest sliver of the bed with my daughter simultaneously stretched up against me as well as taking up the majority of the rest of the bed.  I think my head may have been laying on the bed side table.  I think her feet touched the other side of the bed.  We all wonder how someone so small could take up so much space.

Our friends told me about how their child uses the windmill action when he sleeps with them.  Perhaps if he was old enough to know all his letters, he may simply stop at the “H” instead of turning all the way around.  Life goals.

The End of an Era

These days, most of the co-sleeping has stopped.  While the first few times we didn’t have a visitor in our bed, we relished in the stretch you need after hours of uninterrupted sleep.  But soon, I began to miss her snuggles.  It was our time to be close, even if it was mostly in our dreams.  And it made me start to realize how close we were getting to the times when she would really start to pull away from me.

That’s not to say she sleeps alone now.  She’s convinced her super sweet older brother to snuggle with her.  We’re nearly replaced, for now.  Already she’s starting to leave us, leaving us with the memories of her warm body and breathy dreams.

Do you co-sleep?  What have been your experiences?  Tell us below or continue the conversation the Bleeping Motherhood Facebook page.