Co-sleepers what would you do....

[Shooflypie]

if you found the following? DS is 24 weeks - I put him down, as normal, in the middle of our (large) bed. (Own blanket, no pillows or duvet obviously.) Looked in by chance an hour later and found him fast asleep but having thrashed himself round 90 degrees so that he was parallel to the head of the bed, with his feet on the edge of the mattress .

Now what?

I've just done a quick google on guard rails but it looks like you need a bed head and foot to attach them - which we don't have. And side-car cot I don't think would work either as we have a sort of shelf , 4 inches wide, that runs all the way round the bed.

Any ideas? And what do you do when they start crawling??

You will find that your DS becomes more and more mobile over the next few weeks, especially as he learns to turn over etc.
He is likely to move a lot in his sleep as well as while awake, so this is something that you defintely need to deal with.

Are you determined to continue co-sleeping or would you consider putting him in a cot, either in the same room or in a room on his own?
You may want to consider this option as he may start to disturb you more during the night as he becomes more mobile.

At this stage we started to put him in the cot. It sounds way easier than it was but we started off with feeding him in a chair by the cot until he was asleep and then transferring him (again, sounds easier than it was!) so he gradually became accustomed to being in there. he still joined us in bed when we got too tired to keep settling him back down.

He fell off the bed (it seems they all do, so I am coming to terms with this!) and after that it was cot or bust, I'm afraid.

We have a side thing from Boots that you tuck under the mattress - doesn't need a head or foot to attach to. It's really for older babies but might be worth a look. At about the time dd started crawling she also started taking up too much room in the bed, so we got rid of our bed and bought a super kingsize mattress but not the bedframe, that way if she fell off she wouldn't have far to go. She never did. The mattress is fab and I can't recommend this to co-sleepers highly enough.

Other ideas, could you create a makeshift extension to the shelf round your bed and put his cot mattress on it or a single mattress against the wall? On holiday we had dd in a single bed sandwiched between our bed and the wall, then a wall of pillows along our bed so she couldn't fall out. She was older though. But once they can sit up you can be slightly less cautious about pillows being around.

Good luck!

sorry, not Boots, Mothercare!

Thanks everyone! ALT - will def investigate the M'care thing. Not really possible to get rid of our bed so I guess cot in our room is the next option. At least for the first part of the night when he is on his own.

I am now wondering - how to get him to settle in it....baths send him into a frenzy of excitement so our 'routine' consists of cuddles, pyjamas, feed lying down, sleep.

(Oooo I can hear the words 'rod for your own back...back.....back' echoing round' . Not really - don't regret a thing.) But all tips very gratefully received.

You don't need a bed head in order to fix a bed guard - you can get one that goes under the mattress.

We have really wide bed (8ft) and co sleep but also put a bed guard down one side. Most of them just slide under the mattress and are held by its weight.

I also have a little boy who thinks baths are the most exciting thing since sliced bread, maybe reserve them for earlier in the day, not bed time.

you could swap his bath to the daytime instead if he gets really exited by it?

I had that problem with DS years ago and i just moved the bed next to the wall, but eventually him sleeping across (he kept doing it all the time) was too much and i put him in the cot. He was 9 months old by then and also refused to be breast feed so everything had to change anyway.

It never ends shoofly - dd is 16mo and although she starts the evening in her cot (which actually wasn't as hard to achieve as I thought it might be), she still gets in with us at some point every night.

She fell off the end of our bed (superking) in the middle of the night last week. Bless her, she had a little carpet burn on her face where she must have hit the deck. There are now pillows galore all around the bed. Which dh and I trip on.