From co-sleeping positions at How To Be A Dad:
Every parent knows this letter. Fears it! It’s the H. Some may say it stands for “horrible” but don’t listen to them, they’re just whitewashing it. It stands for Hell. And it’s the kind of night you’re both going to have.
This was one of the first “baby in bed” sleep positions we noted down before we even launched HowToBeADad.com. When we were initially spit-balling ideas back and forth for the series, all Charlie had to say was “the H” and I was immediately laughing humorlessly with bitter familiarity. No explanation necessary.
Every word they say about it is true and yet we still love our co-sleeping… I can’t explain it either.
(Thanks to dogpossum for the link).
But what happens to your duvet? Not a co-sleeper obvs.
Oh good gods, I am so glad we’re not alone! Both our children loved sleeping this way, although now that we’re in separate beds (that is, my partner sleeps with our preschooler on his twin bed, and I sleep with our toddler on our queen, because that is the amount of space we all apparently need) I notice that they tend to stay more “upright” in bed.
And, @Tamara, while I can’t speak for bluemilk – our duvet ends up around our feet, because neither of our children cares for blankets one bit. It’s very frustrating, especially in the wintertime; this mama loves her blankets!
I know! Even with heating I really need a cover over me. Our 4yo was sick yesterday so came in to our bed at 5am this morning, barking orders at us: Mum, are you moving over? Dad, fill my water up! Hey, I don’t have enough duvet! Then she conked out until almost 8am. Poor thing.
Tamara, we half co-sleep (our toddler wakes sometime between 1am and 5am and I carry him into our bed). In our case, he sleeps on top of the covers. Yes, even in winter. (We’re in Sydney, but not on the coast and we don’t have heating, so it gets plenty cold enough at nights.)
He’s always tossed blankets off ever since we stopped swaddling him: it’s actually part of the reason he co-sleeps, at least he gets body heat from us and we don’t go to find him coughing and cold to the touch in his cot.
He’s got decent bed sharing manners (and sleeps heavily enough that we tend to just rotate him when he Hs us) but a few times he’s tried the H up at head height. Not fun.
Another thing that helps is separate single-bed-sized blankets/doonas for each adult. This was also helpful when he was a young infant: he slept in one of those small co-sleepers between our heads, each of us had our own cover so that nothing was stretched over his part of the bed. We actually came to this arrangement years before having him though, because of persistent disputes about who was stealing whose part of which shared sheets while sleeping.
Thanks Mary. We haven’t coslept but I’m indeed familiar with the toddler blanket discarding behaviour in the cot. We’ve dealt with it by making sure the room is always heated to 20C or more and putting it back on during the night (my partner always gets up to use the toilet anyway). My girls area little heaters anyway, so we’ve been lucky.
I laughed about your separate duvets arrangement. When my partner and I got together I had to train him out of stealing the duvet. That was his only option as he refused to go the separate duvets route. In his view it was the beginning of the slippery slope to separate beds!