A little background...
Our little Bella is ten months and two weeks. She has never slept through the night. Up to present, she has been a "co-sleeper"- sleeping in the same bed as her father and I, sleeping in her crib or playpen only during daytime naps and sometimes for the first two hours of the night. She inevitably wakes an hour or so later and gets brought to our bed where she remains for the remainder of the night, waking up every 45 to 1.5 hours to breastfeed.
Our little Bella is ten months and two weeks. She has never slept through the night. Up to present, she has been a "co-sleeper"- sleeping in the same bed as her father and I, sleeping in her crib or playpen only during daytime naps and sometimes for the first two hours of the night. She inevitably wakes an hour or so later and gets brought to our bed where she remains for the remainder of the night, waking up every 45 to 1.5 hours to breastfeed.
To be completely honest, I love sleeping with her and of course, she loves sleeping while surrounded by the warmth of her protective parents. We sleep with our bed against a wall. This way, when she rolls or crawls in her sleep, there is a wall to prevent her from falling should my protective, unsleeping self not get to her in time. When she wakes, I am there to provide her with immediate comfort. When I am away on a rare work trip, my husband is there to provide that same comfort, albeit with a bottle instead of a breast.
Co-sleeping is a wonderful experience that allows the mother to breastfeed throughout the night from the comfort of her warm bed. There's no late night excursions into the cold air to pick up a crying infant who's frustrated because she's sleepy yet so, so hungry. As Bella has grown and developed, there have been no similar treks to a crib to save a baby twisted in some contorted, uncomfortable position because she's crawled or tried to stand up in her sleep. When Bella is uncomfortable or upset for some other reason at night, we are able to comfort her and within minutes, she is back to baby dream land (what do babies dream about anyway??). When we wake in the morning, Bella is all smiles, climbing all over us, laughing, cupping our faces in her tiny hands, playing games in her little, infant way. This is the magical way we wake up in the morning and I treasure each and every waking.
The only, and I mean ONLY drawback to co-sleeping is that Bella has never, not even once, slept through the night. We are woken up every hour to two hours by a baby begging to be comforted. There is a part of me that doesn't care that she wakes up so often. My basic instincts are to comfort my child regardless of whether I have only gotten a cumulative total of two hours of sleep, it's now 4AM, Bella is awake and playing, yet I have a full time job to wake up for in T minus three...but then I hear about children who take years to sleep through the night. I think about my husband who somehow manages a full time job and night classes. I think of myself, a supervisor managing the processing of how many thousands of refugees in Kenya, the Congos, Sudan and Djibouti that are seeking resettlement to the United States. How I'm able to stay awake each day is beyond me. I tend to assume it is a mix of a strong feeling of obligation to all those refugees out there (who don't even know I exist), to the staff I supervise and of course there's that magical inner drive called super mom...This state of being - this constant exhaustion, but constant need to continue on with your day without collapsing, it's something that no non-parent, save the insomniac, could ever imagine. I have forgotten what it's like to feel awake.
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