Attachment Parenting (Reluctantly)

Before we had children, I had a sleep disorder of sorts... as in I actually took sleep medicine for it (not Ambien, although I did take that once, but I stopped it after I had a conversation with a Frenchman while I was in the shower while under its "spell"). But, if I didn't take my sleep medicine, it was very difficult for me to go to sleep (my mind just won't quit sometimes).

Well, since our foray into parenthood, I haven't had to take my sleep medicine at all to go to sleep. It's a blessing, but I think it shows you what true exhaustion is like. It also is a testament to our children's inability to sleep well.

Ever heard of attachment parenting? Well, my wife knows more about this than I do, but it's kind of this idea that your baby is always attached to you... like, you "wear" your baby in a sling, there's something called "breastfeeding on demand" involved, and, <insert huge groan here> "co-sleeping."

Back when our first baby was born, we had already decided to keep the baby in the room with us (in a pack-n-play, I think), but she was a horrible sleeper and even though she would begin her evening of sleeping in her space, somehow she always managed to end up in ours. She would not transfer to her back to her little crib either - it was an immediate wake-up. We would even put a heating pad in her bed before we tried to put her back in it so that it would sort of fake her out, but she didn't buy it! So, we reluctantly became co-sleeping parents (I would end up just moving to the couch most nights). And there was a time that I actually set up a blow up bed in the living room knowing I would be out there at some point. But you know how it is, you are so sleep-deprived, you do anything and everything to get the baby to sleep so that you can too.

There's two out of the four hogging the bed.

Fast-forward a few more children and with the exception of our second-born (who gets the prize for best sleeper!) it's sort of been the same with the other ones. The last two have been even more difficult than the first, and so my wife has become a pro at nursing them in bed and sort of half-sleeping (she's probably chronically sleep-deprived, I'm sure).

So, that's fine and all, I guess, but now we have a problem. All of them want to sleep in our bed all of the time. We put a limit on it, definitely, but inevitably, we wake up to kids in our bed almost every single night. Then, we just take them back to their beds, and go back to sleep ourselves. One time, and I kid you not, they were ALL in our bed one early morning. They had wedged themselves all around and my wife and I were just hovering on the very edge of each side. I’ve been forced on many occasions to sleep in my daughter’s bottom bunk because my bed is so full (this actually has turned into a luxury – a bed to myself.)

The middle has never left.

There really isn't much of a point to this post, except to shake my fist in the air and then start the Donation Bucket for us to get a queen-sized bed. Yes, that's right, folks, we currently have a full-sized one, and that is not going to be big enough, since these kids will probably still be crawling into bed with us when they are teenagers.