What did you do while baby slept?

[squizita]

My dd is 3 months and sleeps well at night in the main.

In accordance with safety guidelines I stay with her when she's asleep, at all times. OK for day naps in the living room, pram or sling ... but baby bedtime means 2-3 hr in a dimly lit bedroom before I can sleep myself.
Apart from mumsnet and Netflix what can I do.

To be brutally honest I feel almost trapped and really down about it. Sitting in the dark every night for 6 months for fear of SIDS. How did you distract yourself?

Munchkin it's like gold dust. I wpuld sell my left leg for the next size up when she grows out of it.

No way on earth would I have done that and DD is only 22 months so it wasn't that long ago.
When she was tiny I would sleep as well! After about a month I just put her upstairs and got on with stuff.
I can't believe the things they come up with to make parents feel guilty these days. Talk about taking all the joy out of early parenthood.

Carol been told it's do do with them sensing your breathing and not slipping too deep into sleep?

I mostly watched tv, or did work on my lap top. I just had the baby in one corner if the room and faced the lights away from him. That's not to say I didn't leave him in the room to get food, to for a wee etc.
The main reason was OH was sleeping in the living room so I needed to be somewhere.

You need to take every piece of advice from the NHS and MWs with a pinch of salt and a healthy dose of realism.

It always seems to me that those guidelines are built to assume that everyone will read them and do less.

Or that if anyone follows sensible advice and something happens, then they will sue. Litigation culture has a lot to answer for!

Your DC isn't a newborn. You are finding the current advice too restrictive and stressful. It is in your DC's interests for you to be rested and unstressed. It's ok to trust your own instincts; you sound like a careful and caring parent. Trust yourself a bit .

SIDS is very very rare. Something like fifteen times rarer than stillbirth. If it's not working for you to keep her downstairs then put her to bed and don't worry about it.

The risk is very very very tiny - you're increasing it by something like 0.002 of a percent. Really, nothing bad is going to happen. If it's easy for you to keep her downstairs then do but if not, don't worry about it.

I know this is the NHS advice, but with both of mine I ignored it after about 4 weeks. My view was that overall, I was doing everything else "right": non-smoking, breastfeeding, room temp ok, own cot in our room, safe bed covers, feet to foot, etc etc, so a couple of hours in their own in the evening was probably ok. I think very few parents actually follow this advice! Plus I agree with pp that babies tend to sleep better away from TVs, lights etc.

But if you are anxious and want to sit with her still, Kindle Paperwhite is good for reading in the dark!

Next time you see the HV, ask for the study data which shows that constant presence by a parent actually reduces SIDS. I bet it's not data-driven but actually a logical leap based on previous advice and older studies. Which does not actually equal data!

And if she does slip into deep sleep in three hours, that is no time at all. And then you're in the room with her. So it's not an issue, really.

If you're a mug like me, you'll spend plenty of hours in your child's room when they're a toddler waiting for them to fall asleep. Make the most of being able to go and do other things!

How would you feel about going in and out, say every 15 mins or so, during the evening? You can check she is on, and the noise will ensure she doesn't go into too deep a sleep??

We kept ds with us in the living room until we went to bed at around 10 until he was 6 months.
My general feeling was ' how bad would I feel if he did die of sids' and I had ignored the advice.
It's just a personal choice. I have heard of a baby dying during a nap so was v scared. Ds was a miracle due to an early menopause diagnosis so tbh I didn't want to take the smallest risk.

According to this around 90% od SIDS deaths occurred when the parent was in the same room.

That breathing thing is just theory. No one knows why statistically there is less risk if a pArent is in the room. It's likely it's cos they will spot and fix any other risk factors ( temp, tummy sleeping etc).

^^yy munchkin. And fix covers which have gone over the baby's head, which is quite a key factor I think.

With our first child, (now 6), I went back to work right after he was born however whilst he always slept through the nights he never really slept for long in the day time, so once he was asleep I'd rush around trying to do all of the things I needed two hands for, and manage one, then he'd wake up again. Our second child, (now 3), was the same, but I did have 2 months away from work when she was born and spent any moments when she was asleep playing with and giving lots of attention to her older brother who I worried was a bit overshadowed by the new baby. I never really worried about them being left in another room during their daytime or night-time sleeps, we had a baby monitor (sound only not screen).

Carol that is meaningless unless you know how much time the parents spend in the room with the baby. Like saying 90% of fatalities in car accidents occured when the victims wore a seatbelt. (Likely because a high proportion of people wear seatbelts).

(Also that link says 75% of babies were alone?! What figure are you looking at?)

Figures/studies are generally unhelpful anyway, as those two conflicting figures show. SIDS is so rare that we cannot gain good evidence about it. The vast majority of SIDS deaths occur when babies are left in unsafe sleeping situations - co-sleeping when alcohol has been drunk, too much fluffy bedding, etc. That's the overwhelming evidence. We put too much focus on little insignificant details IMO.

Avoid the big no-nos, stick to other guidelines if you can do so easily, job done.

Honey you are torturing yourself. Get an angel care monitor and have some proper time to yourself while she's sleeping.

Carol sorry v tired where's that data in the article? I thought it said most occurred with parents out of the room but most of them were to do with poor positioning etc?

I've never sat and watched any of my four children sleeping day or night. I think those guidelines are a bit extreme. I understand you want to do things properly but you can't trap yourself in this way. There really is no need to be at their side constantly. While mine slept in the moses basket during the day, I did chores etc and pretty much anything else that took my fancy, reading, hobbies, watching tv. You are always within earshot, and you can keep going back to have a quick look. If I went for a bath or shower, they came too in the bouncy chair. At night, they were in the basket next to us while we ate dinner and watched tv before we took them up to our room when we went up. By 3 months, they were upstairs with a baby monitor on. You can hear everything. And there are those really techy camera ones now too.

I also want to point out that those guidelines say that by 3 months a baby should be getting into a routine and to leave them awake in the cot to settle.

Shootthemoon I use gro bags and an electric thermometer as if we couldn't guess lol ... I'm wondering whether "pottering around" in and about the room might well be ok!

Squizita I like you had still have anxiety following recurrent miscarriage we have been threads together in the past. I follow the guidelines to the letter, we kept dd moses basket downstairs til she turned 6 months then carried her up, she was getting disturbed a lot and slept much better once we started putting her to bed but I didn't feel comfortable doing it any other way. I love her so much but it is lovely to get that few hours on a night now I was getting exhausted and down because I wasn't getting any time to myself we were having so sit with the tv on low and creeping around then she would wake back up I was shattered! I don't know what else you could do but just wanted to say I was the same.

Well, sorry, I can't answer your original question because whenever mine slept I slept with or got on with life. She slept on me, with me in the same room and alone in another room. I also co-slept with her at night from birth so it's a miracle she survived.

Sleep? Or keep baby downstairs?

Is that supposed to be helpful or just plain rude, purplestripedsock? It's not funny anyway.