I want to preface this piece with this and my response to it, which is I Have No Idea How.
When you’re a co-sleeping parent nosey parkers want to know about your sex life. Not judging, I understand the whole nosey parker thing. How do co-sleepers manage to have sex? How does baby number two or three or four even happen? Nosey park no more. Depending on the age of the child and how discrete your style is, co-sleepers can have sneaky sex in the bed while the baby sleeps nearby – tricky, yes. Or they can tiptoe into the bedroom and remove the sleeping child, placing its sleeping self elsewhere (tiptoeing the whole time), and then have sneaky sex in their own bed. (I can’t tell you how sexually frustrating this gamble can be). Or finally, they can have sex somewhere other than in their own bedroom. Yes, think about that next time you’re visiting my house.
All this sneaky sex is a little ridiculous to the other parents. Actually, it is kind of ridiculous to the co-sleeping parents. After all, who else is having sneaky sex in their own house? Horny housewives and visiting tradespeople? So us co-sleepers can be subject to a little contempt from our incredulous non-co-sleeper associates. Such is the frequency of this derision that co-sleeping parenting books even offer suggestions on how to respond to it.
True.
And I feel traitorous for writing about this, it is like revealing the tips nerdy kids receive for handling bullying – but the suggestion is that you deflect the shaming question on how you have sex with a kind of “what, you mean you only have sex in your bedroom, like how boring is that?”.
But it gets more and more difficult to say that “how boring” line with the right amount of smug because ohmygod how convenient is your own bed for sex? After almost four years of co-sleeping (and we’re about to commence round two we’ve commenced round two and we’re still fully committed to the co-sleeping thing but), we’ve reached a whole other level of appreciation for the invention of the bed.
Humankind, you did good with the bed.
Non co-sleepers don’t need to get so smug. I’ve lost count of the number times we’ve been interrupted having sex but that’s more because we are early morning shaggers and the child does not sleep in.
We also did pretty well with the invention of the “guest” bedroom.
Well lately we don’t co-sleep that much, there’s usually a early morning cuddler but one (or two) could fit in a fair bit of uninterrupted in ones own bed shagging before then, but still, I don’t know how when we’d conceive another child. We are tired. Really really tired. Is it ok if us non-co-sleepers just talk? (you know, really really quietly because chatter wakes the preschooler!)
Beds are convenient, yes, but we’ve learned to be sneaky by using lots of comfy blankets on the floor. Of course there was that one time that I accidentally booted one of the baby’s singing toys in my rush to get laid, which started singing “head, shoulders knees and toes knees and toes” and completely killed the moment AND woke the baby, but that was just that once. Swear.
Guest bedroom. Check.
Blankets on living room floor. Check.
Looking forward to the day our own bed is available again. Check!
Alas the idea of co-sleeping, with or without sex, seems quite appalling to me. Apart from the odd crawling into bed by the youngest child in the wee small hours, fortunately we never had a real problem, and wandering children were taken back to their own beds. I have always been a very bad sleeper, taking ages to get to sleep, and waking easily, and it was bad enough with the children’s father’s leg twitching regularly, making the whole bed shudder, without allowing any further disturbances. So I find it hard to understand why lots of people go in for co-sleeping. to me it was either co-waking, or single sleeplessness..
I’m a bad sleeper, particularly if I’m getting depressed but cosleeping has actually been pretty good for me. Apart from having two biorhythms to follow into sleep, I’ve got a damn cute baby to look at if the negative thoughts start up AND I get the benefits of breastfeeding on my sleep hormones.
I do miss having sex in my bed, instead of the loungeroom or the guest room. My issues are such that I almost have a routine for sex and having it somewhere other than the bed has never really worked out.
Oh just wait for the fun bit where you try to sneak off to have sex and they start banging on the door. “What are you doing in there?” “She’s really upset, she wants Mummy (sound of muffled “I want Mummy” shrieking accompanying and renewed thumping on the door)” “So do I” snarls Hubby but it’s not to be. Quite the mood killer. Sometimes you can bribe them with a DVD and an icecream, but only sometimes. I love being a parent. At least we laughed about it afterward.
Yeah. I love our spare bed. And our couch. I prefer middle-of-the-day anyway. I like sleep.
-puts hand up as another co-sleeper with an active sex life- We’ve never been terribly sneaky about it. It helps that our infant daughter for her first five or six months would happily sleep on the floor or a cushion in any room, so we’d encourage her to sleep wherever she was and then rush for the bed when she was out. There were also nights when we had sex lying next to her, and she’d maybe blink once and then get rocked(!) back to sleep by the bed shaking. She’s now in a cot next to our bed with the side down, mainly because that gives her her own space to sleep sideways or with her arms flung wide. And that makes having sex in our own bed a bit easier, too, but it’s still whenever she’s asleep. At this age, she can’t entertain herself for quite long enough on her own yet. She has woken up a couple of times – there have been occasions where we’ve finished, glanced over and seen a half-asleep small baby watching us in fascination. And we just giggle about that, and she goes back to sleep again once the “entertainment” is over.