My guilty pleasure....

I secretly love sleeping with my kids...I will complain about it once in awhile when I find myself crippled in the morning from sleeping on three square inches of mattress while balancing myself with one foot on the floor. Then I complain....

But secretly, I love having my little ones in my bed. In fact if I am being brutally honest I would rather snuggle a four year old than my husband who incessantly feels the need to grope me in his sleep. My four year old just likes to cuddle-no strings attached.

All of my kids have spent countless nights in our bed. I realized very early on that if you want to get any sleep with a newborn you need to sleep with them. Getting up over and over, sitting in the rocking chair for countless hours blows. Grabbing the baby and throwing a boob in their mouth is a far better use of my time. Once the boob was no longer needed the desire to cuddle my kids in bed did not. I am pretty sure that every expert in the area of child rearing would tell me that I am emotionally crippling my kids. That my need to cuddle them in my bed is surely going to lead to a insomniac psychopath in the future, I beg to differ....All of my kids appear relatively normal and they have all slept with me. They are all capable of going to bed on their own now. None feel the need to crawl in bed with us once they get past the age of about five. And from my perspective none are emotionally stunted or suffering from a Oedipus complex of sorts.

I remember watching Dr.Phil one day and listened to him chastise some poor young mother over the irreversible damage she was doing by allowing her toddler son to sleep with them. He ranted and raved in the way only Dr.Phil can do. You know how he does it-trying to come across as a commoner like the rest of us while all the time making you feel like an uneducated idiot. He went on and on about the reason parents sleep with their kids is to atone for the sins of the day, to make them feel they have spent enough time wit them when in fact the time they did spend was crappy at best. I thought about this for quite a long time, wondering if my love of sleeping in bed with my kids when they are small was a way to make me feel like a better parent. I have to say that his theory, like him, is full of crap, for me at least. I just like it. I love the way they smell, the way they feel so secure all tucked in with us and the best "talks" come at bedtime.


Sam is currently the third wheel in our king size bed. He goes to bed by himself in his own bed but some time in the wee hours of the night or the early hours of the morning he finds his way to our room. He knows the routine well, never attempting to get in on Dad's side, always quiet and always finding his way to lodging his head in my armpit. As I lay on my side in bed it occurred to me that where he sleeps-head in my armpit and bent knees resting on mine, that we fit together perfectly.