How to Shag While Co-Sleeping
It was a few months into my son’s life, and he was co-sleeping next to me, usually in the crook of my arm with his head resting atop my armpit-shoulder-bit. It was early morning and I could feel his dad reaching towards me, and as one thing led to another, there we were, on the other side of the bed attempting connection while our son slept on contentedly. Except that the sudden combined weight on one side of the mattress created a slope in the bed, as my son slowly but surely started to roll down it…towards us. Now, this was the first attempted shag in forever (it wasn’t a great relationship but that’s a whole nother story), so the race was on. Would we get there before our son rolled into us, and made the whole thing a logistical nightmare? I’ll let you guess how it ended. Anyhoo, it really got me thinking about how normal couples with co-sleeping kids actually do it.
Ok, so we’ve moved past the whole co-sleeping controversy thing, right? What’s co-sleeping, I hear you ask? Its when your baby/kid sleeps in the same bed as you. While most parents sleep with their kids regularly; the kids run into your room and jump into your bed in the wee hours of the morning; parents fall asleep in the beds of their little ones trying to ease them to sleep each night; you both fall asleep on the couch together…co-sleeping usually refers to parents and kids who sleep together in the same bed, all night.
Its completely natural, and when you take out the incidences of drugs and alcohol being involved in infant deaths, co-sleeping is as safe, if not safer than babies sleeping down the hall in another room.
In a nutshell, the reason why it can work so well, is that the baby can regulate its own breathing by hearing mamma’s, can feel reassured by hearing the heartbeat it got so used to inside the womb, and gets reassured by a whole bunch of other things like mamma’s smell, warmth, and proximity to boob. This is why I liked it too; rather than get up several times a night, wander down the hall and feed a baby for an hour then stumble back to bed – DID I MENTION SEVERAL TIMES A NIGHT FOR MONTHS ON END??? – I merely had to open my eyes, allow my son nestled safely in the crook of my arm to latch on to said boob, and ta-dahhhh! He and I were both happy and barely-disturbed.
I was never worried about it because early on I found loads of websites & forums where people the world over, talked of their experiences co-sleeping with their kids, sometimes for years on end. They stopped having Mum & Dad’s bedroom, and began to have a Family Bedroom. (I hope the beds are king size).
What I found interesting about it is the number of years kids will co-sleep with their parents. Some kids got introduced to their own beds at age 1, while many kids either got ushered out or chose to leave, right up until age 12 (that was the oldest I found in the forums and in personal stories shared with me from friends & community). Every child and story is different. One of my close friends Kaylee, talks of sleeping with her mum until she was 11years old. An old neighbour once confided both her girls slept in her bed regularly until they were 12. One of my family members talk sadly of the day their 6 year old wanted her own space and bedroom, and that was that. Others talk of being relieved when their snoring child finally took to a new bedroom they’d been pushing for months. Everyone is different.
Now, I became a solo parent very early on, and so I never really had to contend with the ongoing logistics of shagging vs co-sleeping. But in the hopes I’m not a solo parent forever, I was insatiably curious about how co-sleeping folks actually managed it. HOW IN THE HELL DO YOU SHAG?
Sure, there are some out there that probably don’t have much of a libido and for those types, it’s not much of a problem. And I guess with kids, there’s not a whole lot of energy left at the end of the day to shag, let alone get out of the ‘Family Bed’, go somewhere else, and do the deed? SERIOUSLY, HOW??
“We find ways” one forum poster mysteriously writes. “It forces us to be creative and have more fun sex” another cryptic writer proffers. I ask one of my good friends who, with 3 kids, still manages with her hubby to shag most days, and she simply says “In the mornings, and he does all the work”.
My fantasy of hours-long kundalini-inspired sacred sex are quickly flying out the window. I searched further. “Morning nap times. That’s where its at”. Ah-ha! Some answers! But what if you co-sleep with multiple older children, like some seem to do? I, personally, like these answers;
“With all three of them asleep in the same room, we can get busy anywhere else in the house - guest bedroom, couch, bathroom, etc. It’s really not that hard to figure out if you have the desire to. We average 1–2x per week, although I will admit that we would probably do it more often if it was as easy as just rolling over to the person next to you.”
Or this;
“We have a 2 1/2 year old and a 10 month old and we cosleep. The last time we had sex was, oh let me think…oh yeah, last night. We average 2–4 times a week. We do it, as I imagine most parents do, when the kids are asleep. We just do it other places besides our bed. Why is that such a hard concept for some people to grasp? I have to say, I think people who blame co-sleeping for their lack of sex are just using it as an excuse to avoid facing what must be bigger problems in their relationship.”
Oooh, harsh! But still, it makes a valid point – if the will is there, you’ll find a way.
So, there you have it. It appears that having sex while co-sleeping is as simple as finding the energy to get up and go to another room after putting the kids to sleep. Or for the super daring, taking the risk to do it on the other side of the bed while the kids sleep. And after all, the motivation to shag is only there in the first place if you’ve actually got a libido, can find a time and space devoid of kids gazing, and have even a skerrick of the energy needed after a day of KIDS, in the first place.
