One thing I have learnt to work on since having children is: DO NOT JUDGE OTHER PARENTS!!!
When I was still young – ahhh who am I kidding, I’m still young – let’s rather say naive, carefree and childless, I thought I knew it all. I knew the ‘best’ way to parent, I knew what to do and what not to do and I knew what was right and wrong. When I think about it now, how damn arrogant of me!
What has become very apparent to me over the last 11 years is that there is no right and wrong – there is right for you and your situation.
Before I had my son, I used to hear parents talking about how their child was sleeping in their bed again. Or how they just didn’t know how to get their child out of their room. I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. How on earth could people let their children sleep in their beds. Surely the child has its own cot/bed and SHOULD sleep there every night?
Oh, how that came back to bite me!
With my first child, this method worked very well. He was a textbook baby. Slept when he was meant to sleep (in his own cot and then in his own bed – all in his own room), ate when he was meant to eat and cried very little. Then his sister came along 3 years later and was like: ‘Sleep, what’s that?’ For 3 years we were up with her most of the night almost every night. I got to experience first-hand what torture by sleep deprivation is truly about. It was horrific. You start falling asleep on your feet, you start losing all rational thought and you are just plain miserable – and probably a right old pain in the proverbial. Having little to no sleep, is honestly the most debilitating thing I have ever experienced.
So, eventually, we started putting her in our bed to fall asleep and sometimes sleep the whole night. Why on earth had we not done that sooner??? BECAUSE my pre-conceived belief system, was that it wasn’t the right thing to do. What would other people think of me if I did that? Well quite frankly, pooey to what other people think of what you do to get yourself through a night with a decent amount of sleep. And if they did judge me, they were diplomatic enough to keep it to themselves.
Both still fall asleep in our bed – at 8 and 11 years of age – and get carried to their beds when they are asleep. 9/10 evenings I fall asleep with them. They then, sleep the rest of the night in their own beds. Actually, that is my son, my daughter still occasionally creeps through to our bed in the middle of the night and then does her windmill dance for the rest of the night keeping us from a good night’s sleep.
Would I change it? Definitely not. I know that they aren’t going to do this for the rest of their lives. I also know that the time I have with them wanting to be this close to me, isn’t going to last forever. My son has already told us that he is very keen to go to boarding school for High School and despite me saying I won’t be there to fall asleep with him and that he will be in a dorm with just his mates or a room on his own – he is sticking to his guns.
Quite honestly, I love the time I have with them quietly cuddling up to me and falling asleep. It makes me feel like the most important person in their little worlds and so closely connected to them both – something that isn’t going to last forever.
So, I am taking it and loving it because it works for me and is right for me.
