good night, sweet princess
Around the seventh month of pregnancy, we borrowed two baby items from our friends Rachael and Stan: an automatic breast pump, and a cosleeper. Both items turned out to be essential parenting tools, but not necessarily in the ways we expected.
The breast pump — a misnomer if there ever was one, since the device deflates instead of inflates — has proven most useful not as a machine that allows Mom to resume the daily office grind or have an evening out, but as a gadget that solves the problem of excessive milk production. And the cosleeper served mostly as a gargantuan nightstand for the first couple of months before getting shoved into a corner of the bedroom and turned into a bassinet.
As most of our friends who’ve used a cosleeper told us, you might start out with the baby in the cosleeper, but you’ll end up with the baby in your bed. This has turned out to be true not just over the course of the past four months, but over the course of each night. We might get Delphine to sack out around 9 or 10 p.m. in the bassinet-cosleeper, but by the wee hours, after middle-of-the-night nursing, she usually joins us.
Sometimes she’s a little fussy after feeding, or she seems a little chilled, or the cat is inside and we don’t want to shut the bedroom door to keep the cat out and the stuffy air in. And occasionally Delphine has trouble with spitting up and gagging, so we put her with us to keep the proverbial eye on her.
But often the real reason is simply that we miss her. Sleeping in her bassinet on the other side of the room just seems so far away.
As with baby wearing, we didn’t realize that cosleeping was so politicized. The baby’s fussy and calms down in a baby carrier? Heck, stick her in there and skip the rhetoric about how wearing your baby makes you a righteous parent. The baby sleeps comfortably in your bed and makes you feel better about her? Sheesh, put her in there until she’s too big for it and don’t worry about the nervous nellies who say cosleeping is dangerous.
Delphine sleeps in the middle of our bed, her head between our pillows (both firm memory-foam thingies from Ikea) and her body mostly above the covers. In theory, this pillows-and-covers strategy will prevent her from getting smothered. So far, the practice has proven pretty successful.
But at some point in the next few months, the combination of Delphine’s increasing size and the restless kicking she does in her sleep will boot her out of our bed. And the bassinet that she naps in right now — the former cosleeper, remember — will soon be too small for her. Which means that she’ll have to start sleeping in her own crib. In her own bedroom. Far away from us. Sob.
