Mothering

Being a mom is rough. It's not as angelic as it seems in the movies, or even when you look on someone elses life. But I love it. I adore every single minute.

I look back on when I was pregnant (and before!) about how naive I was. I would see other people (mainly online, because how else do we openly share our lives?) with their parenting styles, or things they did, and think "I will NEVER do that" and then the baby comes, and she wakes up as soon as you lay her down, and so to just get 2 hours of sleep you pull her in bed with you, and it's so much easier to nurse laying down, so you just stay that way all night... Before I had her, I was STRICTLY against bed sharing. I just KNEW I would suffocate my baby. But then it turned out to be the easiest thing, and we both got more sleep. I never had the sleep deprivation most new mothers have, because she slept SO well snuggled up against me. I researched it, I began following simple rules, and viola. We bedshared.Then, as she got older, I began putting her in her Arms Reach Co-Sleeper or Babytrend Pack N Play when she first fell asleep for the night. Some times she'd stay in it 20 minutes, sometimes two hours, sometimes more. As she got older, she stayed in there longer and longer, and the last month or so, she's been consistently sleeping through the night in her baby bed in our room.

So...Keevia has been sleeping the past 4-5 nights in her crib ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE HOUSE. I really enjoy being able to read in bed, or to shower in the master bed room, or to, youknow with my husband without being scared of waking her up. But I miss her. Like crazy.

She still comes in bed with me from her first wake up on. Usually she wakes somewhere between 5-7 am. I usually am up by 8ish. So although we get some snuggle time, it's not as much.

I always go and check on her right before I go to lay down. And the urge to scoop her up and take her to bed with me is sometimes overwhelming. My arms literally ache. I just want to be close to her. I want to STOP time. She is growing so quickly, getting soooo big so fast. I want her to stay little forever. I want to soak in our snuggles, and our games of peek-a-boo. I want to always be the hand she reaches for, the arms she wants to snuggle in. She's turning into such an independent little lady, and it breaks my heart -- the entire time my heart is swelling with pride. She's precious, precocious, and priceless.

I didn't intend on this to just be a post about bedsharing... but it kind of turned out that way. It literally is/was one of the things I am most pleased with about how I parent. It's not for everyone, and I fully understand that, but I wish it wasn't given such a bad rap in our culture. EVERYTIME anyone would ask where she slept, and I would say our room, they would immediately say "You better not bring her in bed with you!" to which I would respond "She's slept with me every night since she's been born, she just always starts out in her baby bed." What business is it of theirs? Sometimes I get very smart and quote that we're the only nation that doesn't practice some form of bed sharing. It just irks me. Yes, I know that sometimes people end up bed-sharing out of desperation, and end up hating it and see no end in sight. But a lot of times I think they really do enjoy it, it's just culturally seen as such a "bad" thing. I refuse to let people tell me that what I'm doing isn't 'right'.

Drives me batty. I don't think I have the temperment to be a mom!