help with bed decision--new mama-to-be

[evjolin]

so here is my current plan, need advice/opinions/thoughts....

i plan to room share with my baby for the first few months, for a bundle of reasons, breastfeeding being one of them. baby will be in a leander cradle (http://leanderdesign.com/en/produkter/cradle) hung from a stand or the ceiling. i will be next to baby in a bed.

i plan to move the baby to his/her own room once he/she outgrows the cradle (approx. 6 mos.)

i don't want to buy a crib purely for financial reasons. (if you have looked up the cost of importing the 600 dollar leander cradle, i bought it on ebay for 200). an organic mattress is very important to me, and i would rather buy an organic twin bed and stick it and 6 month old baby on the floor, with a mesh side rail.

am i totally nuts??? everyone tells me i need a crib if i am not going to co-sleep.

[xekomaya]

Well, I'm not sure why you're not planning on co-sleeping, but of course there is no reason a 6 month old can't sleep on a regular mattress.

That said, 6 month old babies can very normally nurse 4-6x a night and much more on a bad night. I would have been out of my mind with a baby in another bed let alone another room. You might want to hold off planning on that until your baby arrives and you see what it is like. Sleep deprivation is awful, I don't know why anyone would add to that on purpose.

To get an organic mattress, you don't need to buy a twin bed if you don't want to. They sell them in crib size, which is also "toddler bed" size. We went right to buying a toddler bed and put it up against our bed as a side-car around a year when we needed more space.

gl!

[evjolin]

thanks for the input, sounds like i should clarify some things :-)

while i am neither for nor against co sleeping, i just don't think it is for me. as you suggest though, sleep deprivation may make me the world's loudest cheerleader for it, lol!

the reason i don't want to purchase the organic crib mattress is because i don't want to ALSO purchase an organic twin. organic mattresses cost more, and my train of thought is that if i can skip the 300-500 dollar crib mattress and go straight to the 500-700 twin, i will be saving some moula.