Bed swapping

The title might sound like a fun college experience, cuddling in with your best mate for a sleepover or the boy you fancy asking to stay in your bed after a house party…oh the memories! But no, this is the torturous sleeping patterns of your life when you have kids!

Towards the end of my pregnancy my pelvic girdle pain and hip pain became really bad, so much so that I needed to sleep with a pillow under my hip, a pillow under my bump, a pillow between my legs and two pillows under my head. I was a pillow-monster and, as you can imagine, not very compact in the bed, so my poor husband got the boot!

We have a 3 bedroom house, we had recently taken a single bed out of the spare room to make room for a cot as we were midway through decorating it as a nursery. The cot and a desk were both in the spare room, we were still working from home under Covid restrictions and we needed a second work station along with the standing desk in the living room.

We had moved that spare single bed into my son’s room, he was on a toddler bed on the other side of the bedroom. So my husband started sleeping in my son’s room towards the end of my pregnancy.

Then when the baby was born I had the Next-to-Me co-sleeper attached to the bed in our room and was breastfeeding throughout the night. Instead of keeping my husband awake all night I suggested he keep sleeping in the spare room in with our son, which in theory sounded fine but in practice, without realising it, we created a monster. 

My toddler son got so used to having his Dad in the room at night, coupled with the upheaval of the arrival of a new baby sister into the house, that when  my husband tried to move back into our bedroom a few weeks after the baby was born, our son did not react well.

He kept waking up, shouting for us, in the middle of the night, and when we would go in, he wanted us to sleep in the spare bed across from him. This continued for a good few weeks and it felt like we were two single-parents I would man-mark Ellie breastfeeding her and my husband would look after Matthew and sleep in his room.

As Ellie got bigger, I set a milestone at 5 months to start letting her nap in her cot during the day to get used to sleeping in her new room and the surroundings. I was also starting to drop down and reduce breastfeeds and introduce some formula feeds.

So I thought, ok, when Ellie moves into her own room we can try again.

Thankfully, Ellie was very good at settling into her own cot and once she was set we dismantled the co-sleeper and reclaimed our room. The co-sleeper is fantastic, but it’s such a physical presence in the room that when we removed it, it felt like we had regained a bit more space not only physically but emotionally too for our relationship.

However, our hopes were soon crushed, Matthew did not react well! It was torture, if Matthew woke up, he would wake Ellie up, then we would all be awake too. My husband would have to go into Matthew’s room and sleep in there and I would be in trying to settle Ellie again in her room. Then I started to suffer really badly with being too anxious to sleep as I was so over tired.

Eventually we decided we would try to break this cycle on holidays. We had rented a house in Wexford and wanted to put Matthew in his own room so he could get used to sleeping by himself again, and it worked! Ironically, Ellie didn’t sleep well on the holiday as she got a viral infection!

But at least we had broken the cycle of Matthew having someone sleeping in his room at night and it meant my husband could finally stop sleeping under a dinosaur duvet and be back in his own bedroom with his wife!