Sleeping Arrangements

I have always wanted to co-sleep with my kids. Biggest problem with this set up is ME. I cannot sleep. So with Ayden and Mason, I pulled them into bed for the few three months and grinned and beared it. Some days we went and slept in the spare bed, some days they would sleep on their own, but many days we would just try to sleep as best as we could together.

The biddgest reason I want to co-sleep is because of my nursing relationship with my kiddos. We nurse on demand, and it is so much easier to roll over and feed a baby, then get up, get baby up, get comfy in a chair or bed, and then put a sleeping baby back down. Normally they WAKE up.

So I have researched several different ways for this new little one to sleep. First I thought I would want a hammock- thinking he would sleep longer between feedings. Then I found a website about sidecarring a crib. This is where you take the fourth rail off of your crib and push it against the bed- and make the mattresses level, a great invention for a co-sleeping mother who can't co-sleep! This way the rolling over, not moving a baby, and being close all works out but everyone has their own space.

I was going to use our crib for this, but I was a little upset about loosing the flexibility of a crib in the nursery, and the crib taking up tons of space in our room. Since I will be going back to work- I still like our babies to nap ok on their own, so I like having both solutions availiable to us if it works. I started looking on craigslist and Woodlands Online and found this mini-crib used. I got a great deal.

Then I bought some extra matresses to have the bed and crib even. This made the crib rails not tall enough, so I purchased some bed risers for the crib to litteraly raise the level of the crib. I bought one more extra mattress to fill in the gap between the mini crib and the bed- and here we have my dream sleep solution. I padded the bumper pad against the back wall to make sure the top mattress stays flush with our bed. I still have to paint the raisers black and get some sheets for the bottom mattress. We will also be attaching the crib to our bed with zip ties, and bungee cords. The crib will be further up towards my head as well- I was just measuring height with this set up. I got many of my ideas and catered them to fit our bed/crib from here.

Here are our initial pictures, and you know in three short months I will be posting a picture with a cute little boy sleeping soundly next to his mama!