Co-sleeping ~ The Transition

This is a follow-on to my post called Co-sleeping Rod or Redemption, and I’m actually quite surprised to be writing this so quickly!

In my last post I talked about how I had been co-sleeping with my daughter since she was born, and she’s now heading towards three years old. The biggest factor in this has not been about her, it’s much more about my emotions. I feel that the co-sleeping is my way of making it up to her, if I’ve had to tell her off or been impatient with her during the day. It’s the same pattern of behaviour that happened with her big brother, who thankfully is now sleeping by himself in his own room, but I couldn’t break the cycle. The absurdity of it has been that I’m super sleep deprived, which makes me grumpy and impatient, and then I feel like I’m redeeming myself when I co-sleep. Which is the very thing that makes me sleep deprived.

A Big Step Forward

In the last few weeks it’s been all change though, for two reasons. Firstly I got to the point of being beyond-broken with tiredness, so my husband took over ‘night duty’. To be fair to him, he does offer to do this most nights, but I never let him.

The second thing that happened was my daughter decided that she wanted to sleep in her own room, instead of in mummy’s bed. In part I think this was an effort to emulate her brother, who she adoringly looks up to. So on went the princess duvet cover, and we reassembled the bed guard and moved some toys into her room. We had talked about a full redecoration of her room, in an effort to encourage her to spend more time in there, but we didn’t want to delay things!

How It Went

Night one was a huge step forward, she slept for four hours by herself, before waking and moving into the big bed for the rest of the night. Night two was even better, with nearly six hours in the princess bed. A few weeks on and she is going to sleep by herself, and staying there for at least a couple of hours, whoop whoop!

Coinciding with this all happening, we have also had a lot of progress with potty training so I think there might be some sort of development phase going on. My daughter seems to want to do a lot more things herself, and perhaps she is understanding that being a big girl involves sleeping by herself.

I am effectively sleeping by myself for a full night, which has been a challenge so far! I have to tell myself to not get involved, even though sometimes I can hear her waking (with my husband tending to her).

I’m very relieved that the bond between myself and my daughter hasn’t been affected at all, in fact I feel it’s stronger, because I’ve got more energy to devote to her.