need some ideas for alternate sleep arrangements - any advice?

[sunwise]

Hi all, we are deep in the midst of the four-month sleep regression in my house (my DS has gone from waking 1-2 times each night to waking nearly hourly...) and I am looking for some ideas for alternate sleep arrangements to make things easier on me for the nighttime nursing.

Here is what we do now - DS starts the night in the co-sleeper that is sidecarred to my side of the bed. Once he wakes up (usually about an hour after I put him down), I bring him into bed to nurse. Sometimes I put him back in the co-sleeper, other times I leave him in bed with me. Problems are cropping up because it is becoming more and more difficult to make the transfer back into the co-sleeper after nursing. DS is not the deepest sleeper so often he will wake up within 15 minutes of being placed back in the co-sleeper (whereas he might sleep 1-2 hours if I left him in bed with me).

I would have absolutely no problem keeping him in bed with me except that I find it extremely uncomfortable. DH and I have a queen-sized mattress, and DS ends up taking up a lot of space. DH sleeps fine, but I end up either squeezed almost into the co-sleeper or far into the middle of the bed. Then my back starts hurting, and at times DS kicks and punches in his sleep.

Ideally, what I would like is to find a way to nurse DS in his own space so that I do not need to transfer him into another bed when we finish. And then I can go back to my own space and get some decent sleep as well. Here are the options I have thought of - please let me know your opinions/advice on these, or ideas for other arrangements I haven't considered:

1. Sidecar the crib: we have a crib but we have never used it. It is a drop-side crib that converts to a toddler bed, so I believe it could be safely sidecarred because it is designed to have one side removed. But what I'm not sure about is, would I be able to nurse DS in the crib? Can it hold my weight?

2. Mattresses on the floor: We could move our queen mattress to the floor and get a twin mattress to use as a bed for DS (and put the twin mattress next to my side of the bed). However, DH is concerned that having our mattress on the floor would be uncomfortable. Has anyone found that to be the case? I can't imagine it would be very different than being on top of our box spring as it is currently. It will just be much lower to the ground.

3. Buy a king sized mattress and use bed rails: this one is probably the least likely to work because our bedroom is very small and I'm not sure a king mattress will fit. Would also require additional expenses of buying new sheets.

What do you think?? Thanks in advance for any words of wisdom!

[LittleBirdy]

Oh I could have written this post myself, down to just about every detail!  DS also went from a blissful one to two wakeups per night to waking up every hour or two.  Here is what we did:

I went out and bought DS a big boy bed.  I intended to buy a twin size, but all the floor models at the furniture store were full sized and I had the guy show me with a tape measure how wide a twin was and IMHO a twin would be just as bad as half a queen.  (Funny story: I tried to explain to the sales guy what I was looking for without going into detail, but when I realized I wasn't making sense I caved and told him the whole story.  He started to laugh, and said that his son was 22 months and still in their bed and that he slept on the couch for 3 months before they finally just bought a king sized bed!)

So DS has a full sized bed in his room.  Takes up less room than you would think.  DH sleeps alone in our queen, and I sleep with DS in the full sized bed, though we still try to have his first stint in his crib.  A carefully placed pillow to support my lower back helps a ton.  The plan is the full sized bed will be his bed once he's old enough.

Of course this won't work if there is only one bedroom in your house/apt, but we have 2 bedrooms so it worked for us.

PS - DS is exactly one month older than your DS.  We got a TWO WEEK break between the 4 month sleep regression and what I can only assume is a 6 month sleep regression... I am DYING.  But hopefully we are coming out of it.