Our transition to a floor bed was a saving grace! We started using a floor bed when O was ten months old, and it was just exactly what O needed to feel safe enough to nap independently. As I wrote a few weeks ago in the blog Navigating False Starts and Split Nights, seven to eleven months was a challenging sleep age. One of the hardest parts was that O would only nap on me (or in a carrier). While you know I love a good contact nap, they just aren’t possible all the time. Enter the best solution (after trying the crib several times): a floor bed.

In my last “O’s Sleep Journey” post, I shared how O’s night sleep was impacted during the seven to eleven months stage. In this post, I’ll share more about our experience with naps and how they ultimately led us to try a floor bed. Spoiler (for those who think a floor bed is hippie-dipper and are about to stop reading here) we loved it! It solved all the problems we had with crib sleep! Especially the all-too-common failed transfer. 

Developmental Milestones 

When O was around seven months old, she was learning so many things and her naps started to be challenging again. She began to crawl and pull to standing and eventually, by ten months old, was cruising along the furniture. She was also saying her first words at this age, and separation anxiety had begun. These are typical milestones for babies around seven to eleven months and notoriously impact sleep significantly. It can affect their nights or naps, and for some babies, both. During O’s first year, she would resist naps whenever she worked on a new skill. And new skills were plenty at this age….

Despite a burst in development, we decided to make one final attempt at crib naps when O was eight months old. I told myself, “if this doesn’t work, we are trying a floor bed.” I knew a floor bed was the next best thing to a crib safety-wise. I knew that I could safely leave O on our mattress if it was low to the floor, as long as we safety-proofed the room and I watched the video monitor closely. We had really low expectations. I read somewhere that if a baby isn’t napping consistently in their crib by nine months, there’s a good chance they never would and that a floor bed would be an easier transition. 

Reasons we tried the crib one final time

I still don’t know why I made this last attempt. I think I just wanted to say she was sleeping like she “should be” to my family and friends. I also believe that how much time, energy and money I spent working on her nursery while I was pregnant played a role in why I wanted to try the crib again. We had a beautiful room that was only used for diaper changes and bedtime stories. Although this shouldn’t have bothered me, it did. 

Of course, there was a small part of me that wanted some alone time, but after eight months of primarily contact napping, I had gotten better at taking care of my needs while O was awake. I can’t say I was desperate for a meal or a shower at this age. 

Whatever the reason, I made one final attempt. I don’t know whether it was the low pressure I put on it working or whether she was just developmentally ready, but it worked! O began napping in her crib consistently once a day. I would nurse and rock her to sleep, finally master my ninja-like stealthy transfer into the crib, then slip out for 20-40 mins to myself (she always had a short crib nap no matter what). 

So end of the story, right? She started sleeping in her crib, so that must mean crib sleep became the norm for O? NOPE! This all went out the window a month later (I’m sure you guessed that by the title and intro…) 

When she turned nine months, and separation anxiety peaked, O’s crib days were over. Seriously, it did not matter how stealthy I was during the transfer, she woke up every time. She also would not nap in the car or the stroller all of a sudden; even though she could see or hear me, this was just too much separation for her during this stage. After a week of failed crib transfers and her refusing to nap on the go, we went to contact napping for about six weeks exclusively. 

Realizing something needed to change

You probably know by now how much I love snuggling O while she naps (you can read all about why I love contact naps here), but I hit a wall after a few weeks. I chalk this up to SO MANY things, not just the exclusive contact napping. 

The cumulative exhaustion from over a month of split nights played a significant role. One way contact napping helped during this phase is that I always set myself up for safe sleep. I did this so I could nap with O during this phase. 

This phase was also hard because I had less support from my village. We still had pandemic restrictions during this time, and with omicron circulating, we didn’t see our loved ones very often. Plus, the further you are from the newborn stage, the more people assume that you have it all figured out. 

And since it was the dead of winter, we weren’t getting out for walks very often. I thrive when I spend lots of time outdoors. My mental health always dips a bit during the winter months if I don’t make a point to get outdoors. 

On top of all these things, I had wildly unrealistic expectations of baby sleep and honestly thought we were going through something abnormal for this age (if this is you, please know it is SO typical for sleep to be “off” during this phase). 

It was a perfect storm for postpartum anxiety. 

I remember feeling like everything was out of my control. 

I was starting to feel touched out. And I did not want to feel that way. I loved contact naps and snuggling my girl, and I wanted to make sure that remained something I loved and looked forward to every day.

I had no desire to try the crib again, but it wouldn’t have worked at this age. And without car and stroller naps in our rotation, I knew it was time to try the floor bed. 

Trying out the Floor Bed

I still remember my husband’s face when I asked him to take our bed apart and put the mattress on the floor. He didn’t bat an eye, knowing how I had been feeling, and took it apart the next evening after work. But I am sure by the look on his face he thought I was out of my mind. We made sure to safety-proof the room and moved her baby monitor from the nursery to our room. We were all set. 

The next day during O’s second nap, I decided to test our floor bed. I nursed and sang her to sleep as usual, then slowly transferred her to our mattress. I immediately felt confident. I had mastered this transfer long ago. I have done it every night since we bedshare. I knew before she even hit the mattress that it was going to work. 

I rolled to the other side of the bed and watched her sleep peacefully for 10 mins before slipping out of the room. When Nic came home from work, he found me standing in the kitchen, staring at the monitor. He laughed and said, “you don’t even look like yourself without O attached to you.” I laughed too.

We both went into our room and were shocked she was sleeping so soundly. We needed to wake her from her nap, which we had never done when she napped independently.

How things improved instantly

We tried a few more independent naps on the floor bed over the next few weeks, and they were all successful. It felt so good to have an option that worked for O when we couldn’t contact nap (or I didn’t want to). 

But here’s the funny thing… once I knew our family floor bed was a reliable nap option, I found myself craving more contact naps. It had done exactly what I was hoping it would do: restore my love for contact napping. Of course, there were times I still transferred and slipped away, but it was reserved for when I had something else I needed to do. The majority of the time contact napped O guilt-free.

How we feel about our floor bed today

And here we are, nine months later, still loving our family floor bed. I actually wrote this post sitting next to O sleeping on our mattress. 

She naps on the family floor bed all the time. I can get her down with no problem, then sneak away to work in my office, dry my hair, or do whatever else I need to do but can’t do during contact napping. Our babysitter can also get O to sleep and then transfer her to the floor bed without a hitch. O also loves the independence of getting on and off the bed herself. It’s also a fun place to play; O loves to run and flop on the bed, roll around or pretend to put her doll to bed. 

I also truly believe this will make for an easier transition when we decide to move on from bedsharing. We can easily set up a similar bed for O in her room and sleep with her in there to get her used to her new sleep space. 

There are many benefits to a floor bed, not just from our experience. I could go on and on, but I’ll save those details for another blog. I’ll end by saying trying out a floor bed was honestly one of the best sleep decisions for our family. Our only regret is that we didn’t try it sooner. 

Motherhood has taught me so many things. In my first post, I shared how I learned to trust my intuition during O’s first three months of life (if you missed it, click here). This is the next part of our journey. I had to lean into that intuition and learn when to ditch social norms when it came to baby sleep. This was a lot harder for me to do than learning to trust my gut, being the rule follower and people pleaser I am. But in the end, I was able to tune out the noise and bedshare confidently. If you are on the fence about whether or not to bedshare or are feeling guilty for this being your current sleep arrangements, this post is for you.

Before O was born, I never thought we would be a bedsharing family. We had O’s sleep arrangements set up well before her arrival, with a bassinet next to our bed for the newborn days and a crib for her to sleep in when she was older. As far as I knew, that was where babies slept, or at least that is where they slept safely, so O not sleeping in her crib never even crossed my mind when I was pregnant.

While I had gotten good at doing what came naturally during the newborn days, there was an instinct I spent a long time fighting: bedsharing. 

For a good reason; if not done safely, bedsharing can be a risky sleeping arrangement for a baby. However, there are ways to make bedsharing safe based on research, and this is where O’s sleep journey led us next. 

*If you are reading this and want information on how to safely bedshare with your baby, look into the work of Professor James McKenna and check out Le Leach Leagues Safe Sleep 7. @cosleepy on Instagram is another excellent resource. 

From day one, O and I had a desire to be close. Even that first night in the hospital, O slept peacefully on either my husband or myself. The few times we tried to lay O in the little hospital basinet, knowing a bit of rest would be good for us, she would cry. So we would pick her up and continue snuggling. On our first night home, when she was just over 48 hours old, O naturally struggled to sleep in her bassinet. I had an overwhelming desire to bring her into our bed, but everything from the prenatal classes we took to the parenting books I had read said this was not safe. I remember saying to my husband a few times during the newborn days, “I wish it were safe for her to sleep with us,” but that is as far as the conversation would go.

After about a week, O started sleeping 2-hour stretches in her bassinet. We had a bassinet that could hover over our mattress, and I would sleep with my face as close to the mesh side as I possibly could, with my hand easily able to be placed on her stomach when she needed reassurance that I was right there. It was almost like we were bedsharing, but she had a separate sleep surface. After two and a half weeks, O was sleeping one 4-6 hour stretch at night without any intervention from us at all, and up to nurse every 2 hours after that. I loved having her so close and would check on her often. Most nights, I would stare at her sleeping next to me. I knew early on when the time came for her to move out of our room, I would miss these nights of just watching her sleep (which is probably a big part of why she has yet to see sleep in her own room at night.) 

O’s nights continued to go smoothly for a few months, but of course, we had the occasional rough night. I remember one night, when O was around two months old and was going through a growth spurt. We were up every hour on the hour. The next day I knew I was too tired to trust myself to stay awake for our morning snuggle on the couch. A friend had mentioned safely napping with her baby in her bed during the newborn phase, so I decided to look up how to safely let O nap in our bed with me right next to her. I found LLL’s Safe Sleep 7 and quickly assessed our bed. We met all the criteria (a sober, non-smoking, breastfeeding mother and a healthy, full-term baby) and could easily make our bed safe (firm mattress, no loose covers, no gaps or cords). I decided to try a nap in our bed in case I couldn’t stay awake. 

I didn’t sleep a wink.

Still, I was glad I hadn’t tried holding her on the couch and that I found guidelines to follow to keep her safe on days I was too tired to hold her for her nap. We swapped a contact nap for a nap in our bed whenever we had a rough night. This was rare, not even weekly, but eventually, after watching her sleep peacefully next to me a few times, I started trusting that she was OK and started being able to nap as well. Even though I enjoyed these naps in our bed, part of me felt guilty for doing them on occasion. I kept our bedsharing naps a secret for a long time. 

Around 4.5 months, O was getting too big for her bassinet. She was waking from rolling into the side of the bassinet most nights and had started wiggling down and running out of leg room a few times a night. One night she rolled and could reach the top edge of her bassinet with her hand, and it just no longer felt safe to me. 

Realizing that O had outgrown her bassinet brought tears to my eyes. I was so not ready for her to sleep in her own room. I couldn’t bare the thought of her not being right next to me. It took some convincing, but later that day, my husband disassembled O’s crib from her perfectly decorated nursery and set it up right next to my side of the bed. I took pictures of our new sleep setup and posted a heartfelt caption about the momentous milestone on my Instagram story, completely oblivious to what was about to unfold….

The ten nights that followed were the most sleepless nights we had since O’s first week of life. She just hated her crib, and the longest stretch of sleep any of us got was 90 mins, with 30-60 mins being the norm. And when she woke it wasn’t her typical light rouse to nurse. She was angry when she woke and took a while to settle, especially if she wasn’t hungry. 

On the 10th night, after more wake-ups than Nic and I could count, at 4 am, I told him I was bringing her into our bed. Thankfully, I already knew how to make our bed safe. Desperate for a bit of sleep, I stripped the heavy duvet and extra pillows from our bed, removed O’s sleep sack, nursed her to sleep then laid her next to me. She slept for 4 hours straight.

Nic and I were shocked. We even thought it might have been a total fluke. The crib was literally touching our mattress; how could it be possible being a few inches closer to mama make all the difference for O? Yet, desperate for a decent night’s sleep, we decided to try it all night the following night. 

O slept from 10 pm to 4 am, then her typical feeding every 2 hours after that until we got up for the day around 8 am. 

Again, we were shocked. We decided we would bedshare for “one more night” to get “caught up on sleep” and go back to trying her crib after that (famous last words, right.) Again, she slept wonderfully! 

After two nights, I was sold. I wanted bedshare exclusively. Nic, on the other hand, wasn’t sure. He was afraid it was harmful and that something horrific was going to happen to O. These were completely valid concerns, and thoughts I had as well. 

I began researching bedsharing, specifically how to do it safely and found Professor James McKenna’s research. I gained confidence that we could bedshare safely. I was amazed by how much evidence there was on the benefits of bedsharing, from increased sleep for the family to the many breastfeeding and milk supply benefits. Once I knew it could be done safely AND there were benefits, I knew bedsharing was something I wanted the do. 

Nic and I landed on a compromise: O would start her night in the crib next to my side of the bed, and I would bring her to bed after her first or second wake for the rest of the night. We did this for a few nights but found all this was doing was cutting into O’s longest stretch of sleep at the beginning of the night. After just a few nights, we were nearing exhaustion again, and Nic and I knew bringing her to bed at the start of the night felt right. So once again, I trusted my intuition, and we started bedsharing exclusively. 

And here we are, almost exactly one year into bedsharing with O, and we still love it! 

Yes, there have been challenges along the way. It took me a while to not feel sick to my stomach every time I told someone about our sleep arrangements, especially when I sensed judgment or disapproval in their reaction. We did attempt her crib at the beginning of the night with the plan to bring her to our bed after her first wake when she was around six months old (to be continued in the next “O’s Sleep Journey” post). When I realized I was only doing this to please those who thought my baby shouldn’t sleep in my bed, I ditched the crib entirely and never looked back. Our sleep setup has also had to evolve as O became more mobile (a post on our evolving bedsharing setup is coming soon) and will continue to evolve as O grows. 

But one thing has remained the same throughout the last year: bedsharing works for us! It helps us get the most sleep possible. It strengthens our bond with O. It has helped us continue our breastfeeding relationship longer than I ever imagined we would! And some of my favourite memories are from bedsharing: the nights she wakes up puts her hand on my cheek and gives me a kiss, or the way she stretches out with her sleepy smile first thing in the morning, or how excited O gets on weekends when she sees that Nic is still next to her when she wakes in the morning. These are all moments we wouldn’t get if we weren’t bedsharing, and I wouldn’t trade them for the world. 

So although I never thought we would ever be a bedsharing family, I am so glad we are!