Left to Right: Me, C, E and J – all asleep together a few hours after I got home from the hospital last evening.

C keeps dripping cold milk all over our bed. It’s irritating. I’m blogging about it over at Babble today…

At 7:30 pm, C asked to go to sleep. She does that. Her 13 year old sister and 11 year old brother decided to lie down with me and their baby sister while she went to sleep. Within 20 minutes, all three kids were snoring. Yep, they all went to sleep for the night. The older kids didn’t even wake up when we moved them to their own beds. They just stumbled up the stairs and went straight back to the Land of Nod.

I think they were tired.

Night before last, I fell asleep pretty early in the evening while getting C to sleep in our bed. C sleeps with us most of the time, and we have a bedrail on my side of the bed, and Jon is usually on the other side of the bed. So she can’t roll off. But even when Jon isn’t there, at 18 months old, C isn’t prone to suddenly crawling to one side of the giant, king-size bed (best purchase we ever made) and leaping off while I am in bed with her. Plus, I am generally very aware of her movements while we are snuggled up together.

But the other night, while just the two of us were in the bed together, and while I was very deeply asleep, I suddenly heard a loud THUMP followed by a small whimper. I knew immediately that I had just heard 30 lb C (yes, she’s a big girl) fall off of our very high bed onto the hardwood floor. I screamed, Jon came running from the other room, and we observed her lying motionless on the floor beside the bed – on Jon’s side.

Oh my God, I thought, she’s knocked out cold!

I frantically scooped her up and put her back in the bed, while Jon turned the lamp on so we could see whether we needed to dial 911. Pretty quickly, though, it became clear that she had been still on the floor because she hadn’t really even woken up from the fall. And as we poked at her and moved her limbs, she was just annoyed that we wouldn’t let her go back to sleep. She was fine, luckily.

Sometimes I am truly amazed that children survive childhood.

And yes, we are adding a second bedrail.

I have really been slammed for the past week, getting ready to do two presentations tomorrow at the Online News Assn event in Nashville, working at my job, working on some freelance projects, blogging at Babble and at the News Sentinel (I wrote about disgraced, gay preacher Ted Haggard today). I also just started a Facebook group for my church, and will be helping with the church communications committee. I am excited about helping with that.

I’ve been so busy lately that I finally broke down and hired myself a new housecleaner-helper-person to come for a few hours once a week. It’s been two years since I had someone to help us with housework regularly. Jon is opposed to paying anyone to do this, but he let me decide (he’s crazy busy right now too, studying for the CPA exam, plus it’s tax season).

Can I just tell you that it is HEAVENLY to come home to a clean(er) house one day a week? It makes a huge difference for me. And the person I found is so sweet, and she does a great job, and uses all earthy crunchy cleaning supplies. It’s great. Money well spent, if you ask me.

The kids are all busy, too. J had her first real, non-family, paid babysitting job last night. She seems to have enjoyed it, and she’s proud that she earned enough money to pay for her mall/movie outing on Friday night. She will also find out today whether she got a part in the school play; we all have fingers crossed. She took acting classes last spring and seems to have a real knack, so I am happy to see her getting involved in school drama. She’ll have more opportunities for that in high school. Also on the J front, the doctor says the sinus attacks she is getting are likely allergies, and has prescribed Flonase. I hope it helps, because they’ve been getting worse suddenly.

Jon and I have decided to begin weaning C from our bed. I plan to do it the same way I did it with her siblings. We are going to put a futon on the floor in our bedroom, and I will lie down with her there to get her to sleep, and will go to her there when she wakes during the night, instead of bringing her into our bed. Then, when she is ready for her own room and bed, we will just use the futon in her new big-girl bed. I don’t think I will be ready to move her into another room for a good while yet, though. Plus, the room that will eventually be her bedroom is currently being used as Jon’s office, and as I mentioned above, he’s pretty busy these days. Once he is through the worst of his stuff, the room itself will need painting and fixing before we move C into it.

So yeah, we are busy. Yeah. But better too much to do than not enough!

UPDATE: J got the lead in the play! I am so happy for her

I am blogging about C’s need for a predictable sleep schedule over at Babble today.

Our house is almost 4,000 square feet. It is 99 years old. It apparently has really bad insulation overall. It has an inordinate number of drafty, original, uninsulated windows.

And today, it’s zero degrees outside.

Needless to say, our house is hard to heat when the weather gets like this. But it made a big difference when we took out the old gas HVAC unit that heats the second floor and replaced it with a high efficiency new electric heat pump. Last winter, before we did that, the second floor would have been an ice box on a morning like today. This morning, it was more like a slightly chilly box. It wasn’t too bad (although the children would tell you that forcing them to live in our old house in the cold weather is akin to forcing them to live in a van down by the river.)

On the first floor, it helps a lot that Jon builds a fire in our fireplace every night, and the fireplace has a woodstove insert thing, that actually blows the heat from the fire out into the air.

But no matter what you do, with a house like ours, in weather like this, it’s a constant battle to keep warm, especially at night, which is why, last night – naming no names – you might have found certain family members all snuggled up with each other in the household’s bigger beds in order to stay cozier.

Via my old pal, the brilliant Kathy Dettwyler, I found this really excellent review of the past 20 years of academic research related to attachment parenting, which ran as a piece in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

I just finished reading an essay about why one mother never uses a baby monitor, in which she writes:

I developed a habit of lolling around bed in the morning, not responding to my daughter’s cries down the hall until they progressed from gentle mewling to outright fury. And in that spirit, I refused to buy a baby monitor.

These days, it seems, there’s no such thing as an off-duty parent. These days, there’s no such thing as an off-duty parent. Even when your children are sleeping, you must remain tethered to them by an electronic gadget, one of those modern-parenting must-haves that our own parents somehow survived without.

Well, I’m gonna agree with her on one point – when it comes to infants and very young children, there isn’t such thing as an off-duty parent, unless that parent takes a break by leaving her baby with another aware, alert and responsible adult. Babies are a huge lot of trouble for the first few years, including at night. Their health and safety requires pretty much 24 hour attention.

And as for our forebears not needing electronic gadgets to tether themselves to their babies, well, that’s because until not that long ago, most women breastfed their infants, including at night, meaning they stayed close anyway, without the need for any sort of electronic gadgetry.

Obviously, each parent knows her own baby best, and I am not suggesting that you should always jump to attention at every little whimper and sigh your baby makes during the night, but I cannot imagine “lolling in bed” while my infant screamed in the next room. Would you do that to any other relatively helpless and dependent group of people? Put them in a bed with bars in another room and then refuse to respond to them until you felt like it? Disabled people? Elderly people?

And frankly, even if I had no intellectual problem with allowing my babe to cry and sob in another room, every fiber of my maternal instinct would be screaming for me to respond to my baby. I wouldn’t be physically able to do any “lolling” when my baby was crying out for me from another room.

I sleep with my baby. We start the night with her lying down with me on our bed until she drifts off. Then her daddy moves her to her own crib, which is set up right next to my side of the bed. At some point during the night, she asks to get into bed with us, and I pick her up, and snuggle her in between us. She sighs contentedly. I sigh contentedly. We all sleep happily. At some point soon, we will have her own room finished, separated from ours by a bathroom, and we will begin the process of moving her to her own sleep space – probably starting with naps after she’s about two years old.

This is what works for me. Your mileage may vary. Lots of people I know say they cannot sleep well with a child in their bed. That’s okay too, of course. I think the best sleep strategy for a family is the one in which the most people get the most sleep, and everyone feels comfortable and satisfied. For Jon and me, that’s keeping our baby close. I would not sleep well at all with her in another room. Plus, since I am separated from her all day while at my job, co-sleeping recharges our attachment batteries, so to speak. We need the touch time.

But whether you have the baby in your bed, in your room, or in another room, it’s imperative that you be able to hear her, and hear her well. In my opinion, putting the baby in another room with no baby monitor is just plain mean. It’s also risky.

 What do I mean by risky? Well, there is increasing research that maternal awareness and response to infant noises and behaviors during sleep reduces the risk of SIDS.  As a mother who has co-slept with three babies now, I know first-hand how symbiotic mother-baby interaction is during the overnight hours in a shared sleep space. A lot of mothering happens while we are in bed together, and I believe that it’s mothering that helps to keep my baby safe.

Leaving SIDS aside, however, what if your baby were choking? Or vomiting? What if part of the crib collapsed? What if one of these things happened while you had her in another room with the door closed, and no baby monitor on? You wouldn’t hear her. She could die.  This is just plain irresponsible, in my opinion.

I understand the desire not to “overparent” children. I get that. But babies need babying. It’s bigger kids who need to be treated like, well, bigger kids. Sometimes parents get the two confused.

For sure, don’t micromanage your five-year-old’s relationships with other kindergarteners. Don’t attach a GPS tracking chip to your 10 year old. Don’t refuse to allow your 12 year old to walk to a friend’s house. Don’t call your 19 year old every single day at college.

But for God’s sake, DO make sure you can clearly hear your infant or young toddler when she is alone in another room at night. That’s not overparenting. That’s good parenting.

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