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A month ago I asked you guys when you stopped co-sleeping, and soon thereafter we received this question from Reenz.
My husband and I are just-before-bed frolickers and I don’t expect that this will change after our baby arrives, especially given work schedules. We plan to co-sleep (using an Arm’s Reach co-sleeper) for the first three months. We’re unsure about after that time.It’s important to us to keep the sexiness flowing post-birth and one of my major reservations about co-sleeping is the loss of sexy time. Of course, I recognize there will be a dip in frequency when we become parents, but we have no intention of putting it on the shelf! It’s also worth noting that there aren’t many comfortable non-bed locations for said activity (the kitchen table is dangerously rickety!).
How do those co-sleeping maintain their sex lives with their kiddos in their space?
we have coslept from the very start with out now 19 month old. We make use of the floor in the living room, the couch and very quietly the floor in the bedroom. It’s an adjustment for sure but you figure it out.
The shower!! creates lots of white noise too, bonus!!
Eh, we have a queen sized bed so we just scoot the baby over by the wall and have sex on the other end of the bed. Sex is a natural and normal thing so what the heck, why not? lol
Although I doubt we’ll be able to pull that off when she gets older (she’s 15 months now)…
We’ve got a full bed and we still do the same as you! Don’t let bed size deter you, unless “acrobatics” mean you need more space 😉
We used an Arm’s Reach for the first 4.5 months and would still do it in the bed quite often. Now, our baby was a good little sleeper and we definitely had to be MUCH quieter than normal, but sometimes that added to the fun!
arms reach cosleeper is great….means bed isn’t off limits (some aren’t ok with it, but we were just fine doing some quiet time loving there). if babe falls alsleep somewhere else (swing, bouncy ect) thats an open invitation to go sneak in some mom dad time! it’ll take a little bit to adjust but you’ll soon find out where you feel most comfortable and how.
Since the baby sleeps in our room, we use the baby’s room to “get down.” It’s kind of silly, but it works for us. We have a very light little sleeper though so it involves some sneaking around in our tiny little house, but it kind of adds to the excitement 🙂 We tried the Arm’s Reach but it didn’t work for us, however if it works for you then you have the whole bed to have fun in!
That’s what we did, too! We moved our “guest bed” into the baby’s room and that became our little love nest.
We use an Arm’s Reach with our baby–and we love it! The bed works fine in the early weeks, as long as it’s not too…earthshaking (bedshaking?) Creativity is important–shower, couch, kitchen, bedroom floor even. Heck, any floor! It can be a lot of fun, and it’s not forever that you’ll have to be away from the bed 🙂
Yeah… we tried once with her asleep in the Arms Reach. Fortunately we finished before either one of us looked over and saw that she was awake & watching us. i think she was about 6 months at the time? we won’t be doing that again.
My son is now three, and he still crawls in bed with us from time to time. We definitely had him sleep with us for the whole first year! So… we used the living room a lot. It’s amazing what a bedroll and a few blankets and pillows can create 🙂
our daughter co-slept with us in bed and in a bassinet right next to us. we just put her in the bassinet if we wanted to be initmate and it didnt bother us that she was near. in those first months we didnt want her anywhere else.
The shower, the couch, another bedroom, the floor, the kitchen counter, the laundry room, etc.
well, the first six weeks you can’t. after that i would just be quiet about it. it isn’t like the baby will know or even understand what you are doing! but when the baby gets older, i would put her in a crib in her own room. but you will slow down in your sex life just because you will be exhausted! you won’t know what sleep is and a baby half the time doesn’t sleep at night so it will be the last thing you think about! my advice? you will figure it out when the time comes. you will know what will work and what won’t based on your baby.
just a quick caveat to this: you probably WONT for the first 6 weeks but i was so overwhelmed with oxytocin and huge amounts of love that it took me exactly a week…hormones do crazy things. unless you have major tearing or a section, the only thing stopping you is a bit of soreness and sometimes a bit if mess…..
yeah, that was fun! We made out like crazy in the first few weeks.
I had a lot of tearing, but was only able to make it about 3 weeks before sexin’ it up.
Regarding the co-sleeping, our daughter is 3 and still sleeping with us. We mostly make use of the closet floor now (it’s a big closet). When she was younger, we would often use the bedroom floor and have used the bed when she was in a deep sleep. We also have nights where friends watch her for us and we can actually use our bed! So weird! I never thought I would find it a weird luxury to actually use the bed for sex! Ha!
I was fine 2 weeks after birth to get busy, horses for courses
I had no tearing, and I phoned my midwife at less than 2 weeks after birth to be cleared for sex and light exercise. She said yes. 🙂
When our daughter got too big for the Arm’s Reach we got a cheap crib and put our bed on the floor with a sidecar twin mattress. Baby starts the night in her crib (and goes there for naps) and then goes on the twin during the night for easy nursing access. This leaves us an entire bed just for ourselves while still co-sleeping.
Duuude! The beauty of the Arms Reach is that it still frees up the big bed.. 😉
That being said.. the couch & the floor, as previous posters have mentioned.. and we have the glorious thing called a guest bedroom (which is really just a futon in another room). You’ll get creative.. and you might be surprised what babes can sleep through.
Here in Australia, there are firm guidelines on co-sleeping etc to help prevent SIDS. We tried to start off with our little one in his own bed, but we couldn’t help bringing him into our bed every night 🙂 we loved being near him. It was only till he was about 4 months old and we used our shower for sex. We didn’t do it as often as we ordinarily do, but sleeping with your baby so close we wouldn’t change for anything :)It’s worth it to sometimes cut down the sexytimes to have such a special experience I think. Good luck with your baby adventures!
Co-sleeping doesn’t cause SIDS or prevent it, hope you mind me pointing this out.
I agree, there is no evidence toward it but it is still ‘not recommended’ here and the excuse is SIDS. It is such a beautiful thing and so natural to sleep with your baby.
For what it’s worth, it’s not recommended in the US either by any mainstream groups. But that’s because they are all full of crap, in my humble opinion. 🙂 22-month co-sleeper here.
It’s so ridiculous, i don’t understand why they don’t recommend such a natural thing. The midwives had a fit when doing James’s health check and got the Pediatrician to have ‘words’ with me. We still did it though and I wouldn’t change it for the world.
It seems to me that the general public does not differentiate between a child passing from SIDS (sudden infant death where no cause can be found) and a child passing in a sleep related accident.
It is proven that co-sleeping without following the recommended guidelines increases the risk of infant death, for example a parent under the influence of drugs/alcohol, sleeping on a couch instead of bed, having blankets/pillows near the babies face etc. However these circumstances where infants have died is not SIDS because the cause is known.
Co-sleeping is a beautiful thing when done safely, but I don’t think it does anyone any favours to not state the risks or to not to promote the safety guidelines (as SIDS Australia does).
Many examples given of when “co-sleeping” has led to harm or death for the baby actually aren’t co-sleeping – it’s just an exhausted parent who unfortunately has fallen asleep while feeding or holding the baby.
So if you look closer at the statistics, they tell a very different story.
We are still mostly co-sleeping at 15 months. By “mostly” I mean that he goes to bed in his crib, and then comes into the bed with us when he wakes up in the middle of the night. Now we have the bed to ourselves at bedtime, but before he started going down in his crib, we just kind of did it whenever and wherever we got a chance.
Think of it like being a teenager again! Sometimes when we’re attempting to balance on the edge of the kitchen table because the baby is taking up the whole bed, I just pretend we are horny newlyweds again, unable to even make it into the other room!
We have special denim “sexy blanket” hanging over the couch to throw down when the urge arises to prevent any unwanted stains on our couch 😉 It was a handmade wedding gift from my grandma. I’ve told her it is our most frequently used blanket, but I think she might shudder if she knew just how we use it!
It’s funny because, before the babe, couch sex felt a little dirty — now bed sex does!
We’ve been fortunate to have a baby with a fairly regular nap pattern. She typically has a longish nap in the morning and a longish nap in the evening. So we end up just letting her fall asleep in her sheep swing in one room while we get it on in the other. We leave the doors open so we can hear, and only once have we had her wake up and start fussing.
We’ve only been at it 3 months (parenting that is, heh) but so far we it’s worked pretty well. I think at one point we articulated a “we’ll trade off who gets to finish if one of us has to leave” but it’s never really happened, fortunately 🙂
Not only do we cosleep with our 18 month old, but often with our six year old, as well. Occasionally luck will have it that both kids have rolled into a corner and are snoring peacefully, at which point we stay in bed. Otherwise, there isn’t really anyplace that’s off limits. Bent over the pool table has been a favorite, recently. The car has also seen its fair share, since the monitor still gets reception outside. Speaking of outside, again – we have a privacy fenced back yard for a multitude of reasons.
We co-sleep with a 3 year old and 18 month old (more like musical beds at the moment). Sex happens when and where it happens. On the floor in the lounge room, kitchen, grass under a full moon, on the other side of the bed to baby. Try not to worry about it or plan it, much more fun when the mood happens and you go with it 🙂
The first six weeks are off limits… so you won’t even have to worry about for a bit. However, I have to say that quite a lot more often than not… we lay in bed and ask each other “Sex… or sleep?” Not very romantic OR fun… but we have so far only only had sex once and our son turned 3 months old today. And we were constant frolickers! Twice the day my water broke and twice daily almost constantly in the weeks leading up to delivery (I felt the need to make up for the sex we would loose during this postpartum time and boy am I grateful!). I miss it like crazy… but these days… it really is all about quality sleep. And if he is going to sleep for a few hours… I don’t want to waste any part of that time.
W co-slept for quite some time. Our daughter would fall asleep sort of sitting up in her boppy pillow. We would scoop her and the pillow up together and put her in the cradle. When we were done with the lovin’ we moved her back to the bed. I imiagine it would work the same with the co-sleeping contraption.
We have adopted the floor space behind the couch as our designated sex spot 😉 That way we can do it while she’s sleeping without having to stare at her sleeping angel face while we’re fooling around–something that tends to kill the excitement. This is a funny question though! I had not thought about before hand and I found myself thinking the same thing for awhile 🙂 Good luck and happy humping
Hehehehe, “happy humping.” 🙂
When he was little and a much lighter sleeper, we’d just move over to the other side of the bed. Dude, the first time we had sex after he was born, I had my hand on his tummy the whole time so he’d stay asleep. He didn’t start being able to sleep without us touching him until about four months. So we’d sneak onto the floor or into the livingroom. The floor was the best! I’d be nursing down the baby and my husband would be laying down blankets and turning on the space heater over in the corner. Very romantic! Ha.
Reading your post I literally lol’d because it totally parallels one of my early parenting sexytime memories… When Xa came home from the hospital he would only sleep in the carseat for the first few weeks… Before my 6 weeks was up my husband and I would have oral sex to keep the romance alive and although it made me feel a little inappropriate I frequently had to rock the carseat to keep the babe asleep while felating my husband! Lol, I’m glad he is sleeping in his own room now, although I will always cherish the time spent co-sleeping!
Two words: Sesame Street.
When we first started gettin’ it on again Xavi was in a bassinet next to our bed, but we had to be super quiet… My hubster and I used the couch, the shower, the lawn furniture out back (we have a privacy fence, the workbench
in the garage, friends’ bathrooms and my favorite was when we backed our jeep into the carport and laid the back seats down! I am glad our monitor has such a great range and our dogs are like our own private Lassies, they let us know when the baby wakes up!