"I Need You So Much"

An old blog post, forgotten in my draft folder, which I am publishing a whole year later (4/08/2016).

My Joseph (27 months) is surprisingly verbal expressive of his emotions. I noted half a year ago with amazement when he would vocalize, "I am scared!" or "I am crying!" When I leave and return home, even though he had a great time with Daddy, he runs into my arms and declares, "I missed you."

But his most common emotional phrase is, "I need you." At two, he's quite the Big Boy who tags along with his siblings during the day. He's off on adventures throughout the house. Yet he returns a couple of times per hour, crawls into my lap, puts his hand on my skin, and announces, "I need you." If I'm irritable and trying to 'be productive,' it becomes apparent how much he means "I NEED YOU" and wants to be held and touch my skin for several minutes.

This morning, my heart nearly melted from this little boy. I was already downstairs when I heard Joseph wake at six, so I went to his bed where he said, "Lay down with me." He likes a lay-down snuggle when he first wakes up, whether he is by a parent's side or I'm already up for the day. He put his hand on my skin, sighed deeply, and said, "I need you so much."

So much!

One thing I can't ever offer advice about is how to get babies and children to sleep independently and early through the night. My babies wake a zillion times per night, I don't leave them for years, and they're not independent till preschool or later. Over the years, I've come down off my soapbox about cosleeping and have seen plenty of families for whom some other sleeping situation is going to work. I was the La Leche League leader defending a woman at our meeting who desperately wanted to stop cosleeping because she had to work full-time and nobody else in the room would stop haranguing her about it.

But I still know what works for our family. I know how cosleeping fulfills the Seven Standards that leads for the majority of women on the Bell curve to natural, God-designed baby spacing (see here and here). (There are always exceptions because somebody has to be on the two tail ends of the Bell curve.) I know how cosleeping helps promote a fabulous milk supply due to increased nursing sessions and the fact that prolactin--the nursing hormone--is highest at night and needs to be stimulated then (see here and here and so many other resources).

I haven't lately shared any information about cosleeping, but there have been some wonderfully useful and scientific articles published lately that I will share for those to whom it is of interest. If it isn't of interest to you, keep on keepin' on!

• The original president of the SIDS foundation came out publicly to declare in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics that bedsharing (not just cosleeping) per se is not dangerous.

• Dr. McKenna, founder of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at Notre Dame University, is now being published even in mainstream sources: see The Huffington Post for a succinct piece. He's no hippie quack!

• This 18-minute video by Dr. McKenna is an absolute gem of a summary on co-sleeping definitions, science, anthropology of human beings, and current politics on control of information. This is a useful overview for someone just considering or learning about co-sleeping before delving into details.