I wondered if anyone had any advice on co sleeping with a young baby. Our baby is 3 months old. Due to my inability to stay awake when breast feeding, I have ended up co sleeping with him and side feeding, as this is safer than falling asleep whilst feeding in any other environment (which was what was happening before). He starts of every night in his next to me crib, but I side feed him when he is hungry and then tend to fall asleep feeding him at some point in the night. He then generally spends the rest of the night with me, unless I put him back in the next to me crib so I can leave the room briefly. My DH has moved into the spare room to help make the co sleeping a bit safer (he is quite a deep sleeper), this also means he can have a decent nights sleep so he fine with it. As it is warm it has been easy for me to have a clear bed and our mattress is quite firm, so I have been fairly comfortable that the sleeping arrangement is relatively safe.
I assumed we had a few months before DC became mobile and we had to think about mattresses on the floor ect. However, a few days ago we noted he could almost roll and the past two nights I have noticed his ability to wriggle around the bed. I am quite worried he will fall off the bed at some point. My solution was to consider moving the bed against the wall, but my DH was worried this might risk the baby getting trapped between the mattress and the wall (a quick Google has shown me that this is possible). The other option is to move a mattress onto the floor, possibly in the room that will be his nursery. Eventually I like the idea of a floor bed for him anyway, but I assumed this would be a single mattress with some kind of low base and that he would sleep in a standard cot for a year or so first. If I sleep with him now I think we would need a double mattress on the floor, as a single would be too small for the baby and me together.
I wondered:
1.How do people who move a double mattress onto the floor air it? Neither of our beds have a base we could place on the floor without legs.
2.Are there any bed guards we could put against the wall to make co sleeping with a baby in our normal bed safe (all of the guards I could find were for use from 18 months only). I have read a lot of things saying that bed guards themselves can be an entrapment risk for young children.
3.If we decide to just continue sleeping in our normal bed are there any extra precautions we should take? It is a king size bed. Currently I sleep in it with our baby alone with just a light quilt up to my waist and one pillow, our baby has his growbag. We have the next to me crib on one side at the head of the bed and I have put pillows on the floor around the rest of the bed (although I am worried this is a bit of a suffocation risk if he did fall into them and I didn't wake up). We have a cot ready for when he out grows the co sleeper crib, but I am not keen to tie it to the bed, as I have heard of babies becoming trapped between cots and beds (I suppose unlike co sleeper cribs cots are not designed to be attached to beds).
Thank you so much. Any advice gratefully received.