Co-sleeping with my child wasn’t something that was included in my parenting plan. But when my son was born, we were both sick and the doctor and nurses advised me that holding him skin to skin would help to keep his body temperature regulated. So I held him on my chest for the majority of our three-day hospital stay.
When my boyfriend and I brought Dylan home, we unsuccessfully tried to put him to sleep in his crib. Then we tried the pack-n-play. After more crying than any of us could handle, we decided to let him sleep in our bed with us. We asked for advice from nurses and friends. We tried to warm his mattress before putting him down to make him more comfortable. That didn’t work. We were told that laying him so that his feet were near the bottom of the crib might help. That also didn’t work. We tried swaddling him and we tried a white noise machine. We tried every combination of all of these tactics we possibly could. We finally tried to let him sleep in his car seat. When he would sleep there, it would work for about one to three hours. After a couple of weeks, that stopped working too.
Almost every night for the first year of his life, Dylan slept in our bed with us. Almost every night we tried to sneak him into his crib after he’d fallen asleep. For the most part, he wouldn’t tolerate even sleeping next to us – he had to be on one of us, chest to chest. When his weight got close to twenty pounds, I decided that my back couldn’t take the extra weight anymore. He finally took a spot in the middle of the bed. Then he became a bed hog, sleeping with his head against one of us and his feet against the other.
Last Thursday night, Dylan was being wild, crawling around the bed, trying to jump on us and laughing for over an hour. I finally decided that it was time for sleep training. That was the toughest night I’ve ever had with him. At first he screamed every time I took my hand off him, then whenever I took a step away from the crib. When he finally gave in, I started to leave his room and he must have been able to sense that I was walking away because he woke up and started bawling. But, after almost two hours, he was finally out for the night.
Each night since then it’s gotten a little easier. He still screams and clings to my shirt when I try to put him down, but it’s taken him much less time to settle down (less than a minute tonight). Now we just need to work on getting him to nap without being held….
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