The Circle of Life

I was never one of the mums who wanted to have her baby co-sleep with her. A, my husband, is an extremely heavy sleeper, and whenever he is stressed out, he starts having nightmares about me being in some dangerous situation that needs rescuing from ( falling off a cliff etc). Of course, I'm not entirely sure they're nightmares and not Freudian slips :) So in his sleepy comatose state, he starts trying to rescue me by yanking at whichever part of me he can reach - my upper arm, my fingers, my hair - and his rescue attempts are usually painful - I still have some bruises on my upperarm from six months ago. Last thing I wanted was a baby lying close to him. Plus I like my space, being a complete insomniac. I need to be able to stretch out and have a good half of a king-sized bed to myself.

When Chubbocks was born, we put him into the jolige, which is a family tradition. A Jolige is a cradle - a sling made out of durable yet really soft cloth - mom's old cotton sarees or dad's old dhotis, for instance. It's slung onto a hook from the ceiling and the baby sleeps in the middle. Because the cloth accomodatingly tightens itself around the baby, the baby feels as snug as if still in the womb and sleeps well. It also keeps the baby clear of draughts and dust. So Chubbocks, and later Puddi, slang from this for the first 3-4 months in our bedroom so I could be at hand for feeding or other problems.

Chubbocks thereafter was shifted to his own cot which was still in our room, and even later, when he had scared the life out of us by jumping out of his cot, to a mattress on the floor, surrounded by the playpen cage so he couldn't roll under our wrought iron bed and hurt himself. I was keen to move him to his own room when he turned around 1 and a half, but A kept feeling it was too soon. When Puddi was about to come along, I put my foot down and said there was no way both kids were going to be co-sleeping with us. So we did up the adjacent bedroom in a jungle theme and got a baby monitor and finally moved Chubbocks out a couple of months before Puddi arrived. She moved into that room and her cot as soon as I got home from my parents' place post delivery.

Last week, however, after all the worry of the hospitalisation, we found that the baby monitor had stopped working, and felt too anxious to want to leave Puddi in a room on her own. Chubbocks had also had a worrying time, with Puddi being hooked up to a drip and me being away, so we told him that as a treat, for a few days he could sleep in our bed. His face lit up, as this is a really rare occurrence, reserved for when he is ill.

For the last week or so, all four of us have been snugly ensconced into one bedroom, Chubbocks between A and me, Puddi at the foot of our bed in her cot, the oil heater making the room cosy and the dark drapes and door shut against the outside world. It's not the most comfortable bed to sleep in - Chubbocks has a habit of throwing the bedclothes off which means I wake up goose-bumpy all of a sudden, and he tends to sleep at diagonal position or even move up onto the pillows, so I have the doubtful felicity of sleeping with his feet on my face, while his head rests on A's.

But despite the inconvenience, there is something so elementally binding, so reassuring about all four of us being huddled together against the bitterly cold world outside, that I wish we could sleep this way forever. Though I'm sure my lower back would have something to say about that. the fact of all four of us being together through the night links us into a tight, loving unit, and I love being able to see my son's peaceful face when I turn over or gaze at Puddi's piquant face finally in repose when i get up in the morning...