Birth of a Cosleeper

I remember (vaguely) telling Mr Goog when I was pregnant that we shouldn’t put the bassinet in our room. I can’t remember my exact reason for this. I have pregnancy amnesia!! But I think it was something to do with not having to then move her into her room at a later date – that it would just be easier to have her in her room from the beginning.

If that was the reason it shows an astronomical misunderstanding of the nature of babies, breastfeeding and maternal instincts in general.

Mr Goog was not having any of it. He insisted we spend $80 on a cosleeper. Essentially it was a little bed that sits on your existing bed so that the little one can’t roll out and you can’t roll over on to them. It had a nightlight on it too which was good for breastfeeding when I was still working on my latch. I was less than enthused by the purchase, but went along with it anyway. How that escaped my hormonal overdrive I don’t know.

It became obvious that I had seriously underestimated things when I was in hospital and was extremely reluctant to put her in the bassinet to sleep and mostly had her sleep with me even though it was a single bed and her preferred sleeping position was on my chest. So I more dozed than slept exactly.

I was not at all worried about the safety aspect. The debate around safety is always fierce, and the Daddy Files advocates strongly against cosleeping or bedsharing on the basis that there are suffocation deaths that occur and any death is not an acceptable risk. However, this fails to take into account a recent study that suggests that the majority of SIDS cases are actual accidental suffocations. If this is the case, it would be far more dangerous for a baby to be in a cot than in bed with parents. In addition, it’s highly likely that cosleeping accidental suffocations are caused by other risk factors such as intoxication, smoking, or the baby being in bed with a person other than the mother.

So now that I look back on it, I don’t really know what my reservation was, I think my main concern was that I didn’t want our little one to feel like she was being punished when we finally moved her into her own room.

Once we got home there was never a question about where she would sleep. The bassinet stayed in our room but was not really used until she was 3 months old, and even then it was usually just for naps and her first sleep of the night. I couldn’t imagine having to get out of bed to breastfeed now, looking back on it. We may live in the southern hemisphere but winter is cold without central heating! And on nights when it was really hard to get her to sleep eventually we’d both just fall asleep in the bed (and we needed it).

Mr Goog liked it too. He has to commute to work (an hour and a half each way) and so if she hadn’t been in bed with us he would have hardly seen her at all.

All evidence that in our case a King size bed is a far better investment than a bassinet or a cot.

Tagged as: baby, breastfeeding, cosleep, safety, sids