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Madison, AL
Bed of Roses
By Stephanie Nakhleh
Issue 132, September/October 2005
Cosleeping was no fun at first. Instead of the nighttime bliss I'd been promised by attachment-parenting enthusiasts, my baby often acted like a nocturnal animal—prowling the sheets in the wee hours, howling for no clear reason. I felt cheated. Where was the state of harmony everyone had told me about: those sweetly synchronous sleep patterns, the magical ability to sleep through midnight nursings? Almost everyone else in the world did this, right? Why was it so hard?
In exasperation, I talked my reluctant husband into trying to train our baby to sleep through the night in her crib. After 20 minutes of listening to her escalating screams, he strode past me with a glare and rescued our sobbing, shaking baby from her wooden prison. This felt absolutely wrong to him, he said—didn't it to me? Looking at my baby, her little fists clutching my shirt as if for dear life, I had to admit it did. So we became a dedicated, if not ecstatic, cosleeping family.
There is no foolproof way to guarantee a good night's sleep when you have young children around—to be the parent of a young child is to be tired. Cosleeping is a skill that when mastered can minimize the inevitable exhaustion. As with any skill, it takes time and practice to get the hang of it, and talking to other masters in the field—that is, other parents with cosleeping experience—can give the tired parent creative ways around the common...