Do you wake your baby when you come into the room?

[ktcl]

I should preface this post about DD with the fact that with DS, 7 years ago, we had a challenging co-sleeping situation. After 14 months of co-sleeping, and getting very little sleep, DS never getting more than a 45 minute stretch, we moved him to his own room, and the very first night, he slept for 4 hours straight. After 14 months, we seemed to have figured out that WE were waking him up!

So now we have a 3 week old. We've been putting her to sleep in a side-carred crib around 7-ish, when she seems to enter into a deeper sleep. When we come into bed around 10-ish, she almost always seems to wake up as we are getting ready for bed. We keep the lights off, and whisper (though we would rather not have to do this), but she still seems to wake up. On the one hand, it could just be her time to wake up and nurse, but it seems like no coincidence that it's ALWAYs right when we're getting into bed.

What do you make of this with our DD? What do you do to make sure your LOs stay asleep when you come to bed? How do you and your DP have a "life in bed" (even just "pillow talk") if you are constantly worried about waking the kid/kids?

[canadianhippie]

sometimes my LO wakes up when I go in, I think he just senses that mummy is around, for some reason, if I try and turn over in bed where my back is facing him, he immediately wakes up and starts whimpering and grabbing on to my back, needless to say, i long to lie on my right side. I am a solo parent so my baby-journey is ideal for co-sleeping, its just us to share. I like to sleep with LO though, so when he wakes up I dont mind, as long as he goes right back to sleep! he normally does though. I nurse him to sleep in "our" bed then when hes out I move him into his crib which is adjacent to the bed and he'll sleep in there anywhere from an hour to 7 hours and wake up to nurse and come in with me.

[ACsMom]

Yes my 6 month old is the same way. I sleep next to her but on a separate mattress (she's on a twin mattress next to our king) so she can't feel me crawling into bed really, but she still senses I'm there. It's only been recently that she hasn't been waking up right when I go in, but it's fool's gold: she wakes up within 20 minutes or so - right when I'm just about asleep! Oh well - we experienced this with our older daughter but one thing we learned was that it WILL change. We don't get a lot of "us" time right now at night time, but we know that all too soon we'll have more than enough and we'll be looking back on these sleep-deprived days with nostalgia.