Before our baby was born I already read about co-sleeping; letting your child sleep in the parents (in this case: our) bed. This is part of the attachment parenting philosophy, which states that you have to keep your baby as close as possible.

Co-sleeping isn't just applicable for kids, but also for babies. At first we were scared about the possibility of rolling over the baby at sleep. Mainstream Western pediatrics point out to that danger, while in the non-Western world co-sleeping is the standard. To be on the safe side, I didn't want to let the baby sleep in our bed. But in the last month we tried to take a different approach.

We already have our baby in a crib alongside the bed to keep our baby as close as possible. We think that this greatly helps in the bonding. Furthermore: my wife can react fast when our baby starts to cry. But sometimes our little girl just doesn't want to be alone in the crib. Or at least: it seems. Sometimes we can stop her fussing by giving milk, but on some times we seem to have no other option but to put her between us in bed. It will not calm her in an instant, but she will eventually get sleepy and go to Slumberland.

The first time she slept between us, I presumed that my wife would eventually pick up the baby and put her back in the crib. That seems naive, but she has a hard time to go to sleep before the baby does. Well, my wife figured that everything was just fine and didn't re-locate the baby. So you can imagine how surprised I was, when I saw our little girl still in our bed, when I opened my eyes on 4:00h.

Although nothing happened and our baby wasn't squashed by one of us, it didn't feel right. That was a feeling I didn't expect, because co-sleeping still feels like a very tempting thing to do. My wife reassured me about the safety of the situation by telling I was noticeably more aware of the fact that there was a baby next to me. Well, I must say: i can't remember rolling over my wife or slapping her in my sleep, so why would it be different with a baby although it sleeps a bit nearer to me than my wife.

I'm still not sure what's best, but for now I will take the middle way: we will only have our little girl in bed, if there's no other efficient way to make her go to sleep. That is: if singing lullabies and giving breast milk doesn't make her go to sleep, we'll put her in our bed. We will put her back in the crib if we should wake up in the middle of the night, but it's also ok if the three of us keep on sleeping until morning.

So we're not making a habit of it. yet. Our baby is getting older so everyday co-sleeping is getting less and less an issue of safety and more an issue of preference/privacy.

Labels: babies, co-sleeping, newborn, sleeping

My wife loves, like all mothers, her child very much. Even a tiny bit more than me (understandable, but I always find that a bit disturbing). And just like most parents she hates to hear her baby cry. But she made it a policy: the "no-cry policy". This means that if the baby cries it cries for a reason. So we never leave our baby upstairs crying in her bed for 10 minutes. We always get up immediately and see what's going on.

And if our baby cries, she does that for a reason most of the time. By being there in times of need, my wife hopes to create a better bond of trust between her and our child. To prove her thesis, she occasionally provides me with supporting evidence. The best article she found that describes what she feels is called Letting Baby "Cry-It-Out" Yes, No! on www.askdrsears.com. There are more articles on that page about that subject.

She needs that affirmation, since most of the people she knows just let the baby cry for some time. Especially people of former generations. They had to feed a baby on schedule, even when they were breast feeding. We once heard one older women say that she would crank up the volume of the radio so she would not have to hear her baby cry for milk while it wasn't time to feed yet. That make my wife's no-cry policy an obscure one.

Is the policy perfect? I think not. Though it is much better than letting the baby cry all the time, I see that my wife is losing a lot of time with our 4-months old baby. So the downside is that the control over your own time is a bit more limited, since you have to act on (almost) every yell.

But it's getting better. Our baby has a larger "vocabulary" now than as a newborn. When she was a newborn, there was little time between desire and yelling. By now, she's fussy for some time before she starts to yell for milk. So she kindly gives us a priority to her needs. So we can now finish what we are doing before attending our lovely little girl. Thanks for that! :)

Labels: babies, crying

Funny how you get so much professional help in the first days/weeks of your parenthood but despite all that attention a major error goes by unnoticed. My wife breastfeeds our baby. We both read that when you breast feed a child, the child will hardly have to burp. That's because it can drink without swallowing air at the same time. Babies who get milk with a bottle have to burp more.

So a baby is a efficient drinker when breast fed. But what we didn't know is that a baby has to learn how to drink without swallowing air. So it will always take a few weeks before it knows how to drink efficient. You'll notice when the baby reached that stage, because it will drink without making any sound.

Being unaware of that learning stage we could experience why we have to help babies to burp: they'll throw up milk all the time. It happened more than once that we laid our baby down and that it suddenly threw up an impressive amount of milk. On top of that: our baby got very stressed when it had to do a big burp.

So, I guess that if they have a bubble in their stomach, it will come up sooner or later. It's best to let that air go away in a controlled fashion. That is: keeping the baby erect for 10 minutes while patting on the back. Or any alternative tactic you know to let the air in the stomach bubble up without any milk traveling with the bubbles. But I must say: you never know for sure if you have all the air out of the stomach...

I learnt one powerful method to let the baby burp: have one hand on the baby's belly and one on her forehead, have her in a vertical position and tilt her slowly until the baby is in a horizontal position with the nose pointing to the floor. Our baby doesn't always like that, but I like to give it a try when I have to.

Labels: babies, breast feeding, burp