These archives contain posts from the UK Midwives and Consumers email list, a discussion group for people interested in midwifery in the UK. All are welcome to join the group. Posts in these archives express the views of the individual authors, and not those of the Association of Radical Midwives.
On the subject of bed-sharing, I wonder if any of you wise ladies could advise me on one aspect. Baby is due in a month and after looking at all the options I have bought a cot with a removable side and adjustable height that can pull up alongside my bed. Realistically though, I'm sure there will be times when he ends up staying next to me after a feed.
So the question is - what sort of bedding should I have on my bed?(presently it is a down duvet and down pillows).thanks in advance.
Don't worry too much about the type of bedding. Just ensure that baby is naked
when in bed with you. If you are b/f then you will automatically adjust the
bedding according to baby's needs (even whilst you are knockingout the z's).
Babies don't suffocate under duvets - they just get too hot. If both you and
baby are starkers, you will act as a thermo-regulator (as any good boy scout/girl
guide could tell you!) Also, don't be tempted to put a pillow behind baby to
stop him/her falling out of bed - this prevents baby moving to safety. Same
principle goes for lifting baby up towards your head pillow after a feed. Don't
do it!!! Leave baby at b/f position and he/she won't get under the pillow (and,
of course, baby will re attach when peckish without disturbing you).
Hope this is all as clear as mud!
Hmm - we used exactly the arrangement Yvonne's talking about, and I'm afraid I don't think keeping the baby naked would have been at all practicable! The reason is that the idea is that the baby basically sleeps on the cot side (using the cot as an extension of the bed) and is scooted over for feeding. It's not really possible to keep a naked baby warm enough when s/he's in the cot and *not* touching mum. (At least, not in our rather on the cold side bedroom in the middle of winter.) And you aren't going to dress and undress the baby when you feed...
What we did, which worked well, was to dress Colin in a sleeper and a zip up
sleeping bag, and then just take care that he *didn't*end up under my quilt.
I didn't find this nearly as hard as I'd feared.When he was on the cot side,
obviously just a question of makingsure my quilt didn't come down over him.
Usually I found it worked best to leave him on his cot mattress and move myself
rather than him; this also had the effect of bringing me down the bed to him
well away from my pillow. To feed from the other breast, I did various things.
When he was tiny I mostly put him between me and DH on top of the quilt. Sometimes
I turned us both so that we had our heads at the foot ends, and then fed with
him on his mattress and me on mine as before. Later, I found it possible to
feed from both breasts without moving, i.e. just
rotate myself to bring the top breast within his reach, but that wasn't possible
when he was small.
TBH the main problem was making sure that I didn't get cold because I wasn't properly covered by my quilt because I was keeping it away from him. In the depths of winter I had a lightblanket (a cot blanket actually) handy to cover any gaps! Mostly he kept me warm though :-)
Sidheag
But we would both be absolutely frozen!! If I am freezing cold, how on earth
am I going to a) get to sleep, and b) keep my baby warm? Does everybody really
heat their houses so hot that they can sleep starkers all year round? Or am
I missing something?
Brenda W - co-slept with every baby. Still am with the latest one :-) With our
nightclothes on LOL.
As all good boy scouts know, if you are starkers, you give and receive warmth. I suggest extra blankets because a dressed baby in bed is not safe. Baby cannot sweat if he/she gets too hot. I feel the cold terribly and have a fleece on my side of the bed as well as having a permanently heated waterbed but, when b/f, I found that I was quite warm because of my raised metabolic rate. Try an open shirt to keep your back and shoulders warm.
Skinto skin is essential for normal thermo-regulation for a co-sleeping baby.
Itis also worth remembering that, if baby is dressed, you are also asking baby
to produce his/her own heat which you then try to keep in with clothes - itis
still reliant on baby's hard work.
Yours wearing a double-glazed vest and fleecy slippers!
Rachel Fitz-D
Not a midwife and not advice, just my experience. I need feather pillows to squish into place to support my neck properly (is my head heavy or summat?? LOL) and we have always had lightweight feather/down duvets (no more than 6tog) and kept the central heating on overnight. Feather/down duvets have the advantage over other kinds as they're flexible enough to shape round the baby. Coincidentally there's been a thread on the BreastfeedingUKandIreland yahoogroup on feeding lying down which might be helpful to read :-)
Tracy
Doesn't have to be hot, and costs less to keep central heating at a fairly
constant level 24/7 than start from scratch each morning... But... A sleep-lab
study found that co-sleeping babies had cooler core temperatures than babies
room-sharing in a cot, I suspect that the mothers involved didn't go starkers
in the lab, but I could be
wrong. ;-)
Tracy
Doesn't have to be hot, and costs less to keep central heating at a fairly constant level 24/7 than start from scratch each morning...
But I don't *have* my central heating on every morning. We wear clothes instead.
I can't believe that every b/f co-sleeping culture round the world routinely
sleeps naked either [shrug].
Quite. I also wonder what one is supposed to do between when the baby goes
to bed and when you do. To begin with you might just go to bed at the same time,
but most people don't find that realistic beyond the first few months. I'm not
going to put a naked baby (with or without covers - they kick them off, in my
experience!)
to bed without me, nor to undress the baby when I go to bed (the latter might
work if you had one of the sleeps-like-the-dead ones,I suppose, but we're putting
more and more constraints on here...)Also the idea that babies "need"
skin to skin for adequate thermoregulation makes all those cot-sleeping babies
a bit of an
anomaly, wouldn't you say?
I feel that telling people they can't cosleep unless they're preparedto have themselves and the baby naked and skin-to-skin all nigh tis a worse example of putting people needlessly off cosleeping than anything the FSID people have said in their leaflet, frankly.
Sidheag
Scuse me chaps but I didn't say anything about the central heating - mine goes off at night as it happens. I just know that, as a mw, I am supposed to give informed advice and then you can go make up your own adult minds about what to do! Research shows , along with lots of lots of basic understandingabout the way bodies work, that skin to skin is the safest way to sleep withbaby. I'm sure lots of people sleep with dressed babies who come to absolutely no harm but that doesn't alter the facts. Whether you follow advise is entirely up to you (I often ignore advise!) As for cot-sleeping babies having thermo problems ... They do. Temperature studies show fluctuations in cot-slept babies whilst co-slept naked babies keep a constant safe temperature. I haven't said people CAN'T sleep unless they are skin-to skin and I wouldn't ever tell anyone that they CAN'T do anything so please don't misquote me! I dealt with the "problem" by having the baby lightly dressed with plenty of blankets in the cot, undressing baby to bringin with me when I went to bed and popping a hot water bottle in the cot to keep the cot and blankets warm in case baby went back in (which they rarely did). On the odd occasion when they went back in (for the half-hour before they woke and missed me and yelled), I put the baby naked into a nice hot bundle of blankets (taking the hot water bottle out). I'm sure that others have equally good or better ways of managing nights but, whatever, don't shoot the messenger just cos you don't like the message. Read the evidence and then make your own mind up.
Yours feeling misrepresented,
Rachel Fitz-D
Hi, as a newbie, and as this is only my second post, I feel reluctant to jump in with a criticism...but I just had to mention that I would never co-sleep in a water bed. No offense to the person who said this but there have been some terrible accidents where babies have died in waterbeds - not when the adult has been beside them hat I know of - but there are always times when you leave the bed and don't want to disturb sleeping baby and leave them there alone even if only for a few minutes.
Regarding heated rooms at night, I do sleep naked with my babies and for their first Winter, when they are little, I keep the bedroom heated allthrough the night. The next Winter I dress them in much the same as I dress myself - some clothing on the bits that will be sticking out of the covers -so with my 3rd child I do put pants on her when it's cold. This is a bit of a hassle because we EC (don't use nappies) but she hates the covers on her legs and kicks them off.
LW updated February 22, 2006