PinotByTheBucketPlease Mon 13-Apr-20 22:10:30

We co-sleep with our 7 month old breastfed baby. Breastfeeding was never in my plan, nor was co-sleeping, but the two kind of just happened and seemed to fit together so well so I just ran with it.



I enjoy sleeping next to our baby, I love cuddling him, it’s made our bond so strong, feeding him to sleep while I doze next to him makes my life a hell of a lot easier, as some nights he can still feed up to five times (or more!), so I’ll be damned if I’m sitting up, hunched over to feed that many times through the night, then struggling to get him settled in a cot for god knows how long after.



A couple months ago, DH declared how unhappy he was about sleeping in the bed with the baby. He said he wasn’t get decent sleep, despite the fact he’d snore from the moment his head hit in the pillow, right up until he’d get up for work the following morning - often keeping me awake for hours at a time in the process!



Regardless, I expressed my sympathy and assured him that we wouldn’t be co-sleeping forever, I refuse to be one of those mums who still have their two year olds in bed with them (nothing against parents that do that, I just know I’ll wind up needing and wanting my bed space at some point!!!). I told him that once the baby drops down to two guaranteed feeds a night (rather than the erratic ones at present) I’ll actively start trying to settle him in to his cot, but for the time being, co-sleeping was saving my sanity and allowing me to have sufficient energy the following day to deal with our 3 year old, and two year old as well as the baby. In the mean time, I’ve been doing my utmost best to keep the baby on the outer side of the bed, away from DH for as much of the night as humanly possible!



Anyway, since lockdown, DH has really ramped up the ‘the baby shouldn’t be sleeping in here with us anymore, you need to do something about it now’ chats. I’m not ready to stop co-sleeping and make my life infinitely harder right now, but because he’s been nagging me, I finally caved this evening.



I took the baby through to our room and spent over two hours trying to settle him in to the cot (a next to me cot), only for him to wake up screaming like someone was murdering him 20 minutes later. I brought the baby back to the lounge with me, and started feeding him in there and said to DH ‘once I’ve finished feeding our baby, seeing as you’re the one who wants him to sleep away from us, you can take him and settle him, because I’ve just lost the best part of my entire evening and haven’t even had half an hour to myself since all three kids went to bed.’



DH turns around and goes ‘No. Its not my problem. You deal with it. You’re the one that started the co-sleeping, you need to fix it, not me!!’. I responded with something along the lines of ‘but co-sleeping and breastfeeding go hand-in-hand, it’s perfectly natural and normal, I’m not even ready to stop co-sleeping, the only reason I'm doing this now is because of you, but if I’m not going to have your support and your help, then fuck it, I won’t even bother’.



With that, I grabbed the spare duvet and a tonne of blankets and set up a makeshift bed in our lounge for myself and the baby, half expecting DH to say either ‘oh don’t do that, I’ll help out and make this easier on you’ or even ‘I’ll sleep in the lounge, you and the baby take the bedroom’, but nope, up he fucking got and went to bed in a huff, not saying goodnight, just fucked off and left me to it with our baby.



AIBU to think this isn’t just MY ‘problem’ to solve? We should be coming together as parents to ‘correct’ this, shouldn’t we? He’s the one that always told me to try breastfeeding our children because ‘it’s better for them’, and on our third and final child, I finally nailed it but now it’s like he’s fucking penalising and berating the efforts I’d put in place to both establish breastfeeding and also make sure I had enough rest to cope with our other young DC’s.



Ugh. Perspectives please!!!!