Sleeping Like Gypsies

Our family of four sleeps together. This statement elicits different responses from different people. Some are horrified, and say “get those kids out of your bed ASAP,” while others think it’s completely normal usually because they shared a bed with their children (co-slept) at some point. Recently a Ukrainian woman informed me that my family sleeps like gypsies! I think she meant that as a not-so-great-thing, but I have a mild obsession with gypsies so I thought it was fantastic.

It wasn’t always this way. In preparation for the girls I read “Babywise: Giving your baby the gift of nighttime sleep” like it was the bible. I was convinced that if I did everything this book said, my girls would sleep through the night on their own. They did not.

When the nurses at Beth Israel instructed us to swaddle the girls, always put them to sleep in separate cribs, and NEVER let them sleep with us or on us (for their own safety), we complied. I thought it made sense since they were so little it would have been too easy to suffocate them. But at about 5 months-old, we realized that they would sleep infinitely longer if they were cuddled in bed with us, and so it began. We tried a handful of times to sleep train them in their cribs, patting their backs without picking them while they wailed, making our way closer and closer to the door, was torture for my husband and me. So we moved a queen-sized mattress to the floor of the nursery so they could sleep there without risk of falling out of our high bed (my dad's idea), and they could come find us if they woke up in the middle of the night. This worked for a time.

Basically I think we’re too lazy to start a sleep battle with the kids. I asked a friend with pre-teens what she thought and she confessed that she’d done the same thing. I love the advice she received from her pediatrician. He told her that these years (infant through pre-school) are the “comfort years” and it was completely natural. I'm embarrassed to confess that I lied to our last pediatrician. She adamantly believed the kids needed to learn to soothe themselves and sleep in their own cribs, and was pretty inflexible on this point, so I lied, so that I wouldn't have to be lectured by her. Needless to say, she's no longer our doctor and I promise not to lie to a physician again.

I envy mothers whose babies sleep in their cribs and had the backbone to sleep-train their little ones. If I had it to do over again, I probably would let them cry-it-out at 6 months-old, and they’d never have know any differently. But I am now a defacto “attachment” parenting mom, and I’m okay with it. Sophie and Sienna may be the only children I have, and eventually they won’t want to sleep with me (they probably won’t even want to talk to me when they’re teenagers), so I’ll keep them close to me as long as possible.