babybay

[Nancy54]

has anyone used one of these co sleeper beds? (expensive here but you can get them cheaper).

www.babybayuk.org/

you can get them in different sizes so i'm thinking it might be a good option to get a big one for my twins (due in sept) as an alternative to moses baskets / normal cot.

anyone got any experience of this type of bed?

Ok, here we go - a good excuse to get this off my chest!!I went a week overdue and hormones drove me to buy a babybay as I worried about dds arrival and whether we would get any sleep. Waste of (ALOT of) money for us. I would not advise buying one for the following reasons.

1. Your twins may not necessarily want to co-sleep, they may be happy in moses baskets or a cot that fits them both. As it happened I had planned a home birth and hoped my dd would sleep beside me in the babybay from night 1, but was transferred to hospital during labour, so she spent the first 4 nights of her life sleeping in a perspex box and was happy in the moses basket (smaller and cosier) when she got home.

1. How big is the bigger babybay you mention? We got the normal one and put dd in it at 6 weeks as she had outgrown the moses basket (she is >90th percentile), but she was too big for the babybay by 15 weeks and kept banging her arms off the sides and waking herself up. 'Suitable for up to 9 months' say the manufacturers - I think not!! So I am not sure how well and how long for 2 twins will fit in.

1. As I sort of said before, my dd was not bothered sleeping on her own, so when we did move her into the babybay we put the extra side on it and put it in the corner of the room - a very expensive cot indeed!!

1. If you are getting it for ease of feeding at night if you are BF that is not the case. The idea of just rolling the baby over to feed and then rolling them back is rubbish! BF lying down is difficult in the beginning and you will have to pick them up to feed off the other side anyway. Obviously bottle feeding involves getting up. They may need changing and will certainly need winding so you will have to get up anyway.

The only occasion I would say it is worthwhile to buy a babybay is if you have a c-section.
I'd say wait until after the birth to see how you are doing and how they are at sleeping and you can always get one b4 you get home from hospital,(quick to order on internet) but have moses baskets (which are cheap) on standby.

We got a second hand bedside cot off of Ebay (£45 in great condition). Its a full size cot rather than the style of the one you linked to which appears to be a moses/crib replacement. Ours is a Cosatto one, which doesn't appear to be a current model, but before we spotted the second hand one we were looking at a similar model Mothercare Bedside Cot

As it can also be used as a regular dropside cot, I don't think its a waste of money if the bedside arrangement doesn't suit us and baby. Even if we had bought the Mothercare one new (£200) it might not have been the cheapest cot we could have gone for, but it was still reasonable.

We do intend to use it by the bed though, I'd like to be close to baby, our room (and flat) are small and I hope we will be able to roll over and feed once we get breastfeeding established - though I won't consider it a failure if we can't.

My baby is still on its way (38+3) so I can't say if it will work brilliantly for us, and certainly I don't know about twins. My advice would be to not spend so much on it if you'll regret it if you don't use the bedside function - and consider how much use you will get out of it - for instance is the twin size one large enough to be the main cot of one of your babies once they would have outgrown a crib/moses basket? Think about what budget you were thinking of for cots etc anyway and try not to get sucked into spending more than that just because of the bedside function.

I thought shopping for one baby was hard work!

thanks for advice / experiences!

the one i was looking at which is apparently for twins is 94cm x 51cm which i think may be a bit small after a while.

i do like the idea of the bedside cot though but it is difficult to know if the babies will like it / prefer moses baskets etc!

i think you're both right that it isn't worth me investing a load of money in this.

argggg

ikea do sell cot that have one removable side (i can't buy from mothercare as i live in france) but i do think you can adjust the height to the height of your bed.

Added to that is the prob that i've been signed off work cos of complications and am supposed to be 'resting' and not going round shops looking at baby stuff.

thank god for the internet!

I found it easier to kick DH out of our bed and have a twin each side of me, in the early days. I wore thick pj tops and pulled the covers up to my waist height so the babies weren't covered, and just rolled over towards whoever needed feeding.

By about 8 weeks DD was happy to go in a normal cot and Ds joined her by aobut 12 wks.

Good luck with your twins - mine are nearly one now and I love them to death!

Hmmm, interesting thoughts. I was planning to get one of these too, but for a singleton. I thought that other reviews I had read had been pretty positive, but it seems I'll have to look into it a bit further..

I bought the babybay for my ds who is now 4.5 months old. I have to say i love it and think it was definitely worth the money. Ds and i have always slept well during the night.
I feed him to sleep lying on my matress and can give both boobs facing the same way quite comfortably. When he wakes up in the night i pull his matress across to me so i can go back to sleep again.
Now he doesn't need his nappy changing at night i don't have to get up at all and so can go back to sleep quickly after night waking.
My son still fits and i'm hoping to get a few more months out of it, although i have noticed that the nct shop now have a full size cot that is a bedside cot so that might have been a more long term solution if i had seen it before my son was born.
My ds was poorly when born and was in the neonatal unit for his first two weeks. He was obvs sleeping in a cot then. But i felt that the babybay sleeping arrangement was great for making up for the lack of early contact and he loves having me close by and i can often settle him back to sleep just by touching him and he never cries during the night because i can attend to him so quickly.
It won't last as long as a bigger cot but if you can afford it i would definitely go for it.

Hopefully a friend is gonna lend me one so prob solved! She has three kids and used it with her third child and said it was great.

I suppose it's like everything - works great for some mums anf babies and not for others.

So i can try it without buying one now...