Cosleeping and getting baby to sleep in the day...

[Alexo]

Hi,
We co-sleep with our 3 month old which is great as I get loads of sleep and I beleive in the benefits of it too. My baby however is difficult to get to sleep in the day, she fall asleep on me when I breastfeed her but I cant put her down to fall asleep on her own when she is showing the tired signs - I have tried sitting there while she falls asleep and she just screams - I have tried to let her cry a bit but I just cant bear to do it- she falls asleep in the car and the buggy but I cant always go out when she needs to sleep!
My health visitor says I need to get her in the cot at night and this will help with the sleeping in the day but I dont want to stop co-sleeping....I just dont know what to do.....

Have you tried a baby sling or putting her in the pram and rocking her. Maybe swaddling?

She's so young, I would just pop her in the sling and see if she'll sleep in there.

Are there any baby massage classes near you,that may help her relax a bit if she's fighting sleep.

It will get better

I used to just hold my DS the entire time he napped. It was a great excuse to MN or watch tv.

When I couldn't do that I would put him down asleep in his cot, which was kept in the living room. He would hear me potter about doing whatever I needed to do and I could be there to pat/shush him in 0.5 of a second so he would settle back down very quickly if he did start to become unsettled.

I feed ds lying down on the bed till he's asleep and then I can roll away and go do something else.

i used to do two things in the end - take him out in the car or the buggy when he absolutely wasn't going to accept sleep in the cot. i decided it was more important for him to get the sleep somehow even if it wasn't convenient to me. of course now, i think why didn't i just nap with him and forget about the cleaning, but hindsight is stupid! if it's any consolation, now that he's 10 months old, his naps have greatly improved - hour and a half in the cot on Monday - best ever. and i was the mum working out where i could drive to that would take 3/4 of an hour at 4 o'clock so that he would have napped 3 hours in a day!! hard to believe, it gets easier, and it doesn't last forever. (maybe not as helpful as you would have liked though!

At about 3 months dd was still having a lot of naps in the sling. When she got a bit bigger, like caughtintheact I used to feed lying down then wait til she fell asleep. We only really stopped that once she started rolling around and nearly fell off the side!

There's no need to be getting her into a cot just yet so don't worry about that either!

When DD was tiny I used to put her in the sling, now I rock her in the buggy. I can't put her in the cot because I've had to take one side off, she screams her head off if she's trapped Is there space in your house to rock the buggy back and forth? This is what I do when I'm still in my pyjamas at lunchtime too busy to go out.

Ah, caughtintheact I remember that sneaky commando roll off the bed! I did that with DD, but she became mobile quite early. I think after that it was the sofa with a hoooge pile of cusions underneath. (It was a futon anyhoo, so low and wide.)

It feels it will never end, but you'll figure something out.

I had a nap with DS during the day as well, to catch up on sleep for both of us. If I didn't nap I would lie on the bed and read a magazine or otherwise just chill out. Lovely times.

His sleep has gradually got better over time even though we are co-sleeping even more than we used to! (He is 2.5, we used to start him off in his own bed but I am 8 months pg so I don't even bother trying now and he starts and ends the night in our bed).

lol Cranky, commando roll is a very apt description.

I was going to say - of course you must do your own Risk Assessment before attempting this!