Oh how I love my bed

I slept in bed last night for the first time since my birthday (almost a month), and it was WONDERFUL. Both Cayden and I slept as best as we have since we came home, save for our stuffy noses.

He did two hours in his snuggle nest in the pack'n'play (moved from the living room into the bedroom), then the rest of the night next to me in bed.

I think co-sleeping may be the way to go for us, at least until Cayden can soothe himself and eats less frequently at night.

We've done it more than a few times on the couch, and the bed is simply more safe and more comfortable for us to share our snooze.

Only complicating factor is that Dad is in the bed. Brian did wake up a couple of times last night, but I don't think we kept him up all that long. No crying or fussing at all last night, since Chicken Wing nursed himself to sleep each time he woke up. And since I didn't have to get up to feed him (we both stayed horizontal in bed), I got to doze while Cayden ate. And his double-stuffed Bum Genius kept him comfortable from midnight until 7 a.m.

LC Mary said sleep studies have shown that co-sleeping can actually give nursing moms the most rewarding sleep possible, since biorhythms of mom and baby get in sync and they fall in and out of REM sleep together. That, and there's no walking around the house for an hour after nursing, to get baby to fall back asleep.

Think about it: when I nurse him upright at night or when he gets a bottle, he has to be rousted from where he rests and the feeding takes anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes. Say it takes another hour to get him back to sleep (not uncommon), and we're already an hour-and-a-half from the start time of the feed. At least once overnight he goes two hours or less between feedings, so that means I'm back at square one. I got not sleep in between, but he's ready to start the cycle again.

With co-sleeping, not only do I get to snuggle with the little bugger almost all night, but we both drift in and out while he eats, and he's never disturbed so much that he needs to be soothed back to drowsiness.

Yes, there are risks associated with co-sleeping, but my little bit of research so far has shown that the horror stories typically accompany situations where simple precautions and/or common sense were ignored. And I plan to talk about co-sleeping more with Mary on Tuesday and check out a book on the topic from Hershey Med's library. Seems the practice is making something of a come-back in the U.S., probably because breast-feeding is also on the up-tick.