The big transition

Lily has been sleeping in our bed since we first brought her home from the hospital. It was never our intention to co-sleep but on that first night, she just seemed so little (not to mention so far away!) in her bassinet and we decided that she should sleep with us. For the past eight weeks, it has worked really well to have her sleeping with us. I firmly believe that it helped with her nighttime sleep routine - I could hear her stirring in the night and quickly could feed her before she started to cry. And for 99% of her nighttime feeds, she would promptly go back to sleep right after I fed her. Plus, it felt like a ton of effort to get out of bed four times in the middle of the night to get her for a feed so keeping her in bed with us was partly laziness (but I prefer to think of it as good self care cause I felt pretty darn well rested most morning!). However, Lily is now mostly sleeping through the night (sleeps for 6-8 hrs straight but usually wakes up for a feed at 5:30am) and it seems less necessary to have her sleep in our bed. I still like the idea of having her really close to me while she's sleeping but I am conscious of the fact that we do not want to establish bad sleeping habits. So, we started working on moving her to her bassinet. I had been trying for weeks to get her to sleep in there for naps with some success. We had also tried to get her to spend the night there last week but it resulted in her waking up every hour (this may or may not have been related to being by herself in the bassinet). Luckily, Scott came up with the idea of putting her "baby bivy" (see previous posts on camping for a refresher on what the baby bivy is) directly into the bassinet and having Lily sleep in the bivy. She always sleeps really well while we are out camping and riding so it seemed like a wonderful idea. Lo and behold, it worked! She's slept in the bivy, in the bassinet, in our room for the past week with no problems. She continues to wake for a feed at 5:30am and has had some nights where she wakes to feed once during the night but all in all, the transition has gone pretty well (especially for Cara who quickly moved back into the space that Lily had previously been occupying!)