Three In The Bed

Sleep training, co-sleeping, exhaustion and joy (a snippet of our journey through sleep)

Welcome to Baby Brain, a space where I – Charlotte, hi! – write about family life with three small children – Poppet (m, 5 years), Pickle (m, 4 years) and Peach (f, 1 year.) Those are not their real names. These are real stories from our days.

Peach is asleep in her own bed. This is a miracle. This is a miracle both because – at 19.5 months of age – she has never slept anywhere but next to me or her dad. And it is a miracle because, up until this morning, her room was used as junk storage.

Behold, the cleared out space:

Spot the toddler 👀

Granted, the rest of the house now looks like it’s exploded, but that’s beside the point.

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I recently read an article about baby sleep that stated the following:

… there’s a trend for parents to almost boast about how challenging their child’s situation is. Instead of trying something that doesn’t necessarily fit with the concept of a “gentle” approach, it can be easier to just say that your child is incapable of sleeping through the night and dismiss sleep training as “mean and cruel.”

Which makes sense. As Nightbitch says (at 0.43):

It’s my fault he doesn’t sleep. I shouldn’t be mad at him. Everybody told me (not to contact nap/co-sleep), but I didn’t listen because I liked it when he slept on my chest like a cosy warm heater. I should have put him down drowsy, but still awake like all the books said, and then he would have great sleep habits for the rest of his life. And I would always have a clean kitchen, a good sex life, and life would be amazing. Fucked that up.

Now what? (Edited for clarity)

*

For one, horrible night when Pickle was 10 months old, I tried to sleep train him. It was an accident. A terrible, expensive accident in that – in my desperate, sleep deprived state – I had reached out to a woman on Instagram that I could have sworn was a different woman on Instagram, entangling myself not with the gentle sleep professional I’d been hankering after for months, but with a cry it out advocate who spent a lot of time telling women they would die if they didn’t use her method. Not as threatening as I’ve made it sound, she mostly meant people could fall to sleep at the wheel, but honestly her sales campaign was so aggressive that if she’d turned up at my bedside with a carving knife, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

Anyway, I reached out to this woman, and a member of her team arranged a video call. Immediately: “What are you concerns?” she said, as “I haven’t slept for longer than a 2 hour stretch since my son was born,” I replied. She looked pleased. “And why are you reaching out now?” she asked, her skin glowing, showing me what I could have if I, too, got some rest, while I gazed back at her with the complexion of Mama Coco.

Me at 33

“I’m struggling to function,” I said. She beamed. “That’s common,” she told me, launching into her sales pitch, using a lot of “this is so kind” and “so gentle” and “a gift to your child,” making her methods sound much lovelier than they would turn out to be. She sent me a plan that she said I could trust, and I chose to believe her because this could only be a good thing, right? The woman I’d followed for so long on Instagram wouldn’t do anything to hurt my child – I’d put in the hours to research her, after all.

Wrong woman though, wasn’t it? Lest we forget.

The night of our call, I wrote a plan. Carefully bypassing scoffing mentions of ‘gentle sleep advocates’ who ‘insist your child will wither like an orphan if you let them feel their feelings’, I wrote down the intervals at which I could attend to Pickle, what his new bedtime routine would be, the lot. Stumbling momentarily over an instruction to never make eye contact, I told myself I was being silly. “This will help us all,” I reminded myself, repeating the woman’s words, “I will be a better mum if I do this.”

Bedtime came, and, well, the plan worked. It took Pickle 10 minutes to fall to sleep. It was “a miracle,” we said. “He barely made a sound!” And he didn’t. But then. Then he woke up, and he wouldn’t re-settle. Then, he screamed for three hours, getting louder and more irate each time we checked in on him, absolutely not responding in the positive manner we'd been promised when we arrived for our timed visits, nor to our stroking and patting. Despite us doing everything the PDF had said we should do to “help” him and “let him know he’s loved,” he became increasingly more devastated, leaving us feeling like the worst parents in the world when he became so upset he could barely catch his breath. In the room next to his, I paced. I ranted. My husband sat with his hands over his ears. Pickle screamed like he was on fire until, finally, my husband snapped. “JUST GET HIM FOR GOD SAKE THIS ISN’T RIGHT!” he shouted, as I jumped up to do just that. Pulling Pickle from his crib and apologising profusely for doing as ‘the bad lady’ had told me to do, I kissed his little head over and over and begged him to forgive me as he fell quickly to sleep, his breath hitching in his throat as I cuddled him to me. I have never regretted anything so much in my life.

The sleep trainer said I must have done something wrong. ‘I did,’ I thought, ‘I went against my instincts and listened to you.’

*

A conversation with a different sleep expert, one month later

Gentle sleep lady (GSL): Tell me what the issue is

Me: He can’t sleep without me, he has reflux so can’t sleep on his back and I’m not sure how to help him

GSL: OK, so what we’re going to try to do is get him sleeping on his back

Me: OK, but he can’t really do that, because it aggravates his reflux

GSL: I understand. So the safest way for a baby to sleep is on their back

Me: I know, but he won’t do that

GSL: Sometimes they fight being put on their back, but ultimately he needs to be on his back

Me: OK so how do I do that?

GSL: Try holding him until he’s asleep, and then put him down on his back

Me: Yes I’ve tried that, but he wakes up instantly when I put him down. Are there any other positions I can put him in with his reflux?

GSL: No so the only thing is that babies are much safer sleeping on their backs

Me: Right, but his reflux doesn’t really allow for him to do that

GSL: Reflux is hard, isn’t it? He does need to be on his back though

Me: OK thanks

GSL: Happy to help! That will be £150.

And then I trained as a gentle infant sleep educator myself, and found a solution that worked. By which I mean, Pickle continued to sleep in my arms until he was two. And I – if we don’t count the times I turned into a cursing ball of rage after being kept up all night nursing – loved it.

*

When Peach was still brand new, I shared an anecdote about co-sleeping. It was scrappy, a first draft published before it was ready that I have been annoyed by since. On the cusp of change in our sleep routine, I felt it time to share a new edit.

‘Three In The Bed’

(April 2024 – children aged 6 months, 2 years and 4 years)

My favourite thing about co-sleeping – not that you asked – is when my daughter reaches across at random to stroke my arm. She does it often, rhythmically moving her soft, squidgy palms up and down – erratically doing it, too. I lie next to her, watching as she suckles and squirms without waking, thinking how lucky I am that she’s mine. It’s beautiful. I wouldn’t miss it for anything. And yet, had you asked me whether I planned to co-sleep pre-motherhood, my answer would have been a confident ‘no.’

My issue with co-sleeping began early. “Plan to co-sleep even if you don’t intend to do it,” I remember a friend saying when I was pregnant with Poppet, as another friend told me to ignore her. “Not everyone does it,” she said with confidence, “co-sleeping is a choice.” The first friend tried to explain her point, but I was adamant it wasn’t for me. ‘If it’s a choice,’ I thought – smug bitch that I was – ‘it’s not one I’m making.’ I closed the door on co-sleeping – slammed it, really – not having to open it even a crack when my baby arrived, for he was one of those rarest of things – a baby that would settle when put down drowsy but awake. A baby that slept through the night. So good was he, in fact, so needless of our help after dark, that we made the decision to try for a second child when he was just nine months old, bringing us Pickle. Refluxey, fractious Pickle, who was born with his own set of needs – mostly the need to touch mummy at all times (please and thank you never leave me mummy I'm scared.)

If Poppet was a sleep unicorn, Pickle was a donkey. Co-sleeping was no longer a choice.

The sleep thief in action

The first time I co-slept with Pickle, he was only a few days old. It happened accidentally – I was breastfeeding him, propped up by a sea of suffocation grade pillows, and I nodded off. I woke with a start, frantically feeling for his heartbeat, convinced that I’d smothered him with my heaving milk machines, racing with adrenaline and (unfairly) furious with my husband for not having been with us to stop me from snoozing. This same scenario played out on repeat for days until, manic, I floated the idea of bed sharing to my husband. “Just for now,” I said, as I frantically carried out safety checks, screaming babe in arms. “Just for now,” he replied.

Two years later, Pickle was still in our bed.

So much for just for now.

The weight of Pickle’s presence, despite his small stature, was heavy – the ‘heated conversations’ happening often as I tried everything to transition him into his own bed, and my husband mostly moaned that he wasn’t in his own bed (#NeverForget.) Resentment grew on both sides as the sleep deprivation continued, culminating in the night we tried to sleep train – an event that has gone down in our personal history as ‘needless torture to the nth degree,’ but that needed to happen for my husband to finally understand. After the fact, his attitude toward bedsharing changed.

“He can sleep with us,” I remember him saying that night.

Suddenly, things weren’t quite so hard.

For the following year, Pickle and I snugged like bugs in rugs as my husband teetered on the edge of the bed/sanity, kicked in the kidneys as often as Pickle’s feet could find him in what I'm sure was a display of dominance, ensuring his father knew that mummy was his “MINES!” It wasn’t until I was pregnant with Peach that the rumblings of change began again and, when my husband recoiled in horror at my idea to just ALL sleep in our one bed (an idea I’m almost certain I presented with jazz hands), I was filled with dread at the thought of what came next. As I counted down the days until a solution would land in my lap, however, Pickle stopped asking for milk at bedtime. A few weeks after that, he went to sleep without holding my hand. And not long after that, he moved into his brother’s room, into his own bed, as though we’d been overreacting all this time, and he could have done it all along (he couldn’t have.) It was bittersweet. But while you might think I’d have missed the cuddling (I did), by the time Peach arrived, any lingering desire to co-sleep had left my body like a ghost in a cartoon, rising from my rotting corpse and walking off of its own volition, never to be seen again. I was thrilled when she was a good sleeper, to this end. I was exasperated to witness her good sleep going to shit when her sleep cycle matured. And I was annoyed by the fact I knew what needed to be done, and that I was going to do it.

Which brings us to now.

Daddy and Peach, unconscious (as mummy read her book nearby, very much awake, before anyone tells me this wasn’t safe)

Now, months later, sat on my bed with my daughter sprawled next to me as I write and read and watch Flight of the Conchords with my husband every night by the light of my laptop. Now, having rapidly bypassed irritation to once more embrace the joy of a little hand seeking me out in the dark, of milky breath against my cheek, the warmth of a cuddle curl, the smell of her hair, her feet on my thighs. Now, leaning in, knowing that – like her brother – one day she won’t need me as much as she needs me right now.

Knowing that this is my choice, after all.

One I am happy I’ve made.

Until next time 😴

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