This past weekend, while sleeping with my husband and little girl on a futon, I thought about how easy bedsharing has made trips. It's wonderful. And while the futon was smaller than what we're used to, we were all comfortable and no one fell off or missed out on sleep because of the smaller space.
It was not always that way. Sure, our cosleeping journey could be summed up as, "Margaret was born, we slept with her that night and every night after that. The end." But it's not as simple as that.
I definitely understand when people say they need their space. That was me.
When we got married, we had different expectations for sleep. McKay expected to cuddle and spoon and such. I expected to be left to my own side of the bed and not touched so I could sleep. Poor McKay.
But he was patient with me. Over time, I eventually got used to someone else in the bed. By "over time" I mean a year to 18 months later, I finally got used to it. Of course, 18 months later I was sharing my body with a little Margaret. Maybe getting used to sleeping with people around me was a result of the fact that you can't really separate yourself from your in utero tenant. But by the time I had Margaret, I was sort of ok with people touching me while asleep.
Of course, this was because I was such a deep sleeper that I didn't notice when I got touched. This worried me; would I notice if my baby stirred?
My labor with Margaret was long. I was tired afterwards. Very tired. I think she was too. And I think McKay was also tired, but I wasn't paying that much attention to him. We went to bed that first night and slept. I slept for 6 hours and then woke up in a panic.
"My baby hasn't eaten in 6 hours! I'm starving her!" I jumped up, picked her up, and attempted to latch a sleeping baby. "You have to eat. You need to eat constantly. It's been so long!"
And the rest of the day continued like that. She slept, occassionally woke to nurse, but slept more than nursed and I thought I was starving her. However, by 48 hours, she was waking more regularly and my panic subsided (yay for calling LLL leaders!)
The next few weeks were interesting. Part of me still wanted my straight sleep, of course, and part of me was getting used to the little person next to me. There were nights that I didn't hear Margaret stir, but McKay did and he would wake me up. I wondered if maybe I was too heavy of a sleeper to wake up for my baby. But slowly and surely, somewhere around 2 and 3 weeks, our sleep linked up and I noticed her more. It was sort of like magic- or more like there was some brain function I had never used before that suddenly came into effect. Something in my brain awoke and said, "There's a baby, it's your baby, be with the baby." Now, over a year and a half later, I'm the one hearing her wake up and McKay's the one sleeping through everything. Just a week ago, she woke up screaming and wouldn't take the breast. I did help her go back to sleep and asked McKay the next morning if he heard that. "No."
Despite my heavy sleeping early on, I didn't worry about smothering Margaret. We kept the pillows away from her, and I trusted that I could sense her presence. I hadn't fallen out of the bed in years, so obviously on some subconscious level, I knew where the edge of the bed was. I trusted that same subconscious level to let me know where my baby was.
Our sleeping got infinitely better at 2 weeks when we bought a night light. I could get up and nurse her without getting completely out of bed to turn on a light. This meant more sleep for me.
Also around that time, I learned to nurse lying down. Also a wonderful development for sleeping with her.
It didn't take long to notice that the longer I stay in bed with her, the longer she sleeps. In fact, it's currently after 9:30 and Margaret is still asleep because I'm blogging this from the bed. If I leave the bed early, she wakes up earlier. I first noticed this pattern when she was 3 months old and it has continued that way (minus teething and illness).
She does kick us sometimes. Last night I woke up once to find her feet at my face, so I just turned her back around and latched her on. Not only does breastfeeding give her lots of happy health benefits, it forces her to not have her feet in our faces!
How long will we continue? I don't know. I've come a long way from rejecting my cuddly husband on our wedding night to sleeping with a wiggly toddler. We'll probably continue when we have a second child. I know she'll get out of our bed eventually. I trust that she'll know when that day is. Until then, we get to wake up to a smiley Margaret.
I wrote this on Monday, which is why there are time differences between posting and when I said I was typing this.
