The Family Bed

Beepers sleeps in our bed. He never, ever starts out the night in our bed, but every night he ends up there. Sometimes much sooner in the night that I would like. Before I had Beepers I swore that kids would not sleep in our bed. Ha! Ha! Ha! I love to sleep and in order to get enough I had to concede to having Beepers in our bed. One problem is that I don’t believe in the “crying it out” method. I don’t want him to cry in the middle of the night. For one, we live with relatives. And two, I just can’t ignore Beepers crying and yelling out my name over 100 times.
Just about every night since Beepers was born I have rocked him to sleep. I breastfed Beepers for 18 months and rocking him to sleep kind of just went along with that. Sometimes I would get frustrated that it took so long to get him to sleep, but most of the time I loved just sitting in the dark holding my sweet little baby.
Beepers has slept through the night about seven times since he was born. Earlier this week he slept through the night for the eighth time, and I wasn’t even here for it. (Every time he sleeps through the night we wake up in the morning thinking he has died.) I went to young women’s camp earlier this week, and stayed there for two days and one night. I was worried about leaving Beepers because last weekend we moved him to a toddler bed and he wasn’t handling it very well. The first two nights he woke up about an hour after he went to sleep screaming and I couldn’t even get him to stop. (It was like he was having a nightmare because his eyes were closed and he was screaming.) Anyway, the third night is when I was at camp. I called Chad early the next morning to see how Beepers had done and much to my surprise he had slept through the night. What is up with that? I would have stayed at camp one more night if it weren’t for the fact that my allergies were so bad and I was completely miserable.
I often wonder how many people end up with their kids in their bed. Sometimes Chad and I feel kind of embarrassed that Beepers is still in our bed, but at the same time sometimes we kind of like it. Most nights Beepers sleeps really well and it doesn’t bother us that he is in our bed. He is a snuggly little guy. He especially likes to snuggle with Chad in the middle of the night.
I have a bunch of ideas of how I am going to do things differently with the next baby, but I truly believe that there is only so much you can do. I work with people whose babies started consistently sleeping through the night when they are a couple months old. I don’t think they did anything special, I think they were just lucky. It’s not like we haven’t tried to get Beepers to sleep through the night. He is an angel when it comes to taking a nap during the day and if he doesn’t get that nap he sleeps horribly at night, so I do my best to make sure he gets a nap almost every day. As much as possible we stick to a consistent bed time and routine. I guess there isn’t really a magic trick or method that works for everyone. It will just take time, and in the meantime we probably should get a king sized bed.