Just don't smother, crush, or maim the baby.

Doug's earnest post about books represents our genuine hopes for beginning our daughter's introduction into the world of literature. Unfortunately, for the first several weeks, Baby's life will consist primarily of sleeping, eating, crying, pooping, barfing, and staring at things. Hopefully, mostly sleeping. Therefore, a more immediate and fundamental goal of ours is simply keeping the baby alive, clean, fed, and in one unbroken piece while she grows and stares at things more. Next comes helping her learn to hold her head up and find things to gnaw on, and eventually, inspiring her to learn to read. And there are so many different ways to accomplish all of these things!

I've mentioned before that Doug's thinking on parenting and mine tend to be complementary. He is more abstract and philosophical and I tend to be more...well, practical. A few weeks ago, I wrote this post about how much exhausting controversy exists within the parenting universe. One hot parenting topic is "Co-sleeping," or "Bed-sharing," a.k.a. keeping the baby in the same bed with mom and dad to sleep and breastfeed; often this approach is juxtaposed with "Cry it Out" or "Sleep Training" methods where the baby lives in another room and the parents try to get the baby to follow schedules and routines dictated by the people who write books.

Right now, as a currently not-too-sleep-deprived-person-who-is-not-yet-a-parent, I tend to fall somewhere in the middle. Partially out of laziness and not wanting to have to get out of bed too much in the middle of the night, and partially because I actually don't think that "sleep training" is appropriate for a newborn. Doug is somewhat ambivalent about this topic at this point, because he is too distracted by thinking about her intellectual development, strategies for eliminating all toxins from her immediate environment (he doesn't actually care about germs; it's the poisonous chemicals that permeate everything that he's obsessed with), and which colleges and grad schools she should apply to. Sigh.

Our bed would likely include more blood and gore...

We didn't mention it in our post about our baby stuff, but we did consider co-sleeping for the first few months of Baby's life with us. Our consideration didn't last long, though, because as soon as we began to consider bed-sharing with an infant, we started noticing how often we crush/whack/elbow each other in the night. Well, I think I was the one who noticed, because Doug is pretty oblivious to the damage he delivers (and receives as I try to reclaim my sliver of bed space) at night. It seems that a necessary component of quality sleep for us includes a lot of thrashing, a good amount of steamrolling, and at least one elbow to the face every so often, for good measure.

Proponents of co-sleeping say that the parental instinct keeps you from crushing your baby, but I'm not so sure about that. We don't leave much space in our queen-sized bed. Also I've never even been good with pets in the bed, and even though I've never breastfed a pet, I think it might turn out to be a similar situation...

This is one way to do it... for small quiet people in large beds.
Which we are not.

By the way, the advantages of co-sleeping seem to be especially strong for fostering a healthy breastfeeding relationship in the beginning while allowing the parents to sleep more because they remain in bed instead of getting up to go into another room to get the hungry baby. They keep the baby beside the mother or between them, or in a co-sleeper that's attached to the bed. Followers of the "Attachment" parenting movement say that bed-sharing also fosters the strongest possible parent/child bonds for future emotional health. There are studies that support co-sleeping, and studies that don't, and whole armies of parents and researchers advocating aggressively for and against it. Here's a link to a helpful pamphlet about co-sleeping, if you're interested.

So this is how we arrived at the solution we did: the convertible bassinet/play-yard for our bedside pictured in this post.. It can serve as the bassinet for the first few months, and then the portable bed/playpen for the next few months until she outgrows it. We definitely don't want to put the baby in another room (and which room...the bathroom? the kitchen?). We want her to be right by my side of the bed so that we (I) can feed and change her with minimum rousing, and go back to sleep. It even has an attached changing table and supply holder!

Right now I'm getting up about 6-8 times a night to pee, with maybe one 3-4 hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep, so she's training me well so far for multiple night feedings. She's also forecast to be a fairly sturdy child, at somewhere between 8-10 lbs with gigantic sasquatch feet, so not breaking her should be fairly easy. We hope.

Our baby has giant feet. Or at least one giant foot. Hopefully they match.