Sleep With Your Baby

Hand-built co-sleepers DO satisfy the nesting instinct, and other tales from the family bed

Sleep with your baby.

That’s it. That’s this lazy person’s advice.

As with everything, you can find a ton of research to back up any perspective, from “it’s dangerous, don’t do it” to “that’s how humans have always done it.” I’m not going to refute anything – that’s not my job – I’m going to tell you what I did, why I did it, and why it worked for me, and then you can store that away in your file under whatever label you like, to pull out and use or not according to your own philosophy.

We got home from the birth center a few hours after Connor was born and climbed into our bed with our new baby lying between us, both of us staring down at this ridiculously small human being we’d made and somehow brought into the world. There was awe and wonder, and not a little bit of terror, as if we’d just been handed the keys to a Ferrari and we’d barely passed our written permit test. We were terrified of crashing, terrified that the duvet would cover his face, terrified to sleep in case he stopped breathing, terrified not to sleep in case we got so tired that we rolled over and crushed him. Every time I woke up I checked his breathing, felt for the covers, and touched his skin. That first night was terrifying and exhilarating, horrible and wonderful, and the longest, most exhausting of my life.

We all survived that first night, and each night thereafter built a little more confidence in the whole parenting thing. We’d gone into it with a few ideas of how we wanted to go on, and a few others became clear along the way. Things were tried and discarded, or tried and adopted, and lessons were learned, though most weren’t too hard or painful. And through it all we developed our own list advice to give new parent about sleeping with their babies.

Our pediatrician started us off with a few words of wisdom that stuck:

Sleep with your baby. Besides the obvious comfort of having a parent right there, it’s a safety issue too. Parents will instantly sense if the rhythm of a baby’s breathing changes for any reason.

Breastfeed on demand before your baby can wake all the way up.

Put your bedside lamp on a dimmer so you never have the turn the light all the way on. The goal is to keep the baby asleep at night as much as possible so he doesn’t wake up and think nighttime is play time. Ditto for don’t get up and walk with a nighttime waker. Nighttime should be dark, quiet, and boring for all involved.

Instead of baby wipes, keep a pump thermos of warm water and a washcloth or two by the bed. The warmth won’t be as shocking to a poopy bottom (though nighttime pooping for an exclusively breastfed baby pretty much stops within a few weeks) and washcloths are remarkably handy for all sorts of nighttime cleanup.

Our experiences absolutely agreed with that wisdom, and we added some of our own trial-and-error tips for nighttimes with babies:

Sleeping with our babies and how we did it:

Instead of decorating a whole baby’s room, we channeled all that creative nesting satisfaction into designing, building, and decorating a sidecar-type co-sleeper. The heavy plywood slotted right into the side rail of our four-poster bed, and we designed it so that we could eventually remove the legs (there were two to hold up the back) and turn it into a low bench. As you can see from this photo, it’s still in use today as a place to put packages outside our front door.

At first we thought the baby might sleep in it, but we soon realized it was more useful as a barrier to keep him from rolling out of bed when he was on the outside edge, and as a place to keep the dimmed lamp, diapers, thermos, washcloths, my lip balm and book, and the remote. Even when we traveled, we turned chair backs into makeshift barriers, or moved furniture to accommodate the baby in our bed. Our pediatrician commented that despite the 30 or so hotel rooms our son had slept in before he was two (traveling with kids is a whole other post), he was always at home because he was with us in our bed.

In the early days, I used “I need to put the baby down” as my excuse to put us both to sleep while I breastfed, and Ed knew that if I disappeared during a dinner party with the baby, I probably wasn’t coming back. Illnesses were caught early, because I could feel temperature changes as they happened, and there was at least one nighttime projectile vomiting instance when Connor was asleep on his back. The vomit went straight up like a fountain, and then right back down onto his face, which was upsetting, but not potentially life-threatening because he was between us. I quickly learned to read baby body language: for example, a sleeping baby who began to move was coming up out of a deep sleep and should be fed before he woke all the way up. I’d tuck my arm under his head and one hand under his booty, then roll him over me to the other (full) side and latch him on so we could both fall back to sleep. Ed never even registered a wake up unless there was a full diaper to change, and after a while even that could be done without a proper return to consciousness (there’s a technique involving the fresh diaper under the wet one which I’m happy to explain to anyone, but I describe better with my hands).

As our babies got older the nighttime diaper changes went away, and the night feeds became comfort feeds. The ability to anticipate vomiting sharpened to the point that our kids could hit the toilet even from our arms, and still no one had ever walked the halls with a wakeful baby. Around age three, both boys seemed to get restless in our bed, so their transitions to their own room came at their request. Once they had their own beds they never really looked back except on birthdays, when the tradition continues to be to come to our room first thing in the morning for cards and gifts. Going to sleep with little boys used to involve lots of procrastination conversations about all manner of random things. Now it’s a rare and treasured time when one of them will lie down next to me to talk. Occasionally I’ll share a hotel room bed with a kid, and now neither of us sleeps well on those nights, but I have never once regretted those very early years of little feet in my stomach and the sounds of a child breathing in the dark.