Have said it once, will say it many more times

• life

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

[imported from livejournal and backdated]

Read on the Alternative Baby forum and then heard on the news while driving back, about some mother who fell asleep with her newborn in the bed and woke up to find it dead.

That in my opinion is one of the worst possible things that could ever happen to anyone.

I feel sad for her.

The thing I’m pissed off about though is how those dumb fucktards in the media (can you tell I have next to no respect for journalists and am concerned about anyone wishing to become one, especially if they are a friend?) sensationlised the shit out of it and everyone’s raving on about the dangers of co-sleeping.

I’ve been co-sleeping with Tiny since birth. Apparently all the research is showing how bad it is, but they’re happily glossing over the facts that co-sleeping reduces incidences of SIDS, gets more sleep for the parents (despite claims that some people have tried really hard to prove that people have worse and lighter sleep if they sleep with the baby, every single parent I’ve spoken to that co-sleeps gets more sleep than parents who don’t unless the latter are lucky enough to have babies that are quite happy to sleep on their own…rare but happens), and assists in creating good parent-child relationships.

As with everything else (seeing as “parenting” seems to have been relegated as a toolbox with tools to assist in raising a small one) it may not be “for” everyone and it may not work for some people. Though I would like to point out that the “Western” world (America mostly, but a decent chunk of Europe and Australia and I’m not sure where else) is vastly in the minority as far as sleeping arrangements go, pretty much everywhere else babies crash in with their parents, often in Asia and I think Africa babies crash in with the entire family. Considering the infant mortality rate directly related to co-sleeping in places where it’s a regular thing, anyone who tries to tell me that co-sleeping is bad should do some research the other way.

Because everyone these days does their best to avoid blame even when it is their fault, it’s a lot easier to blame processes than people (co-sleeping is bad rather than that particular situation was bad).

I don’t want to blame the mother but if she doesn’t regularly co-sleep with the baby and dropped into bed with it exhausted, accidents had a higher chance of happening. If you regularly co-sleep with a baby (co-sleeping should not be done if one or both parents smoke or do drugs, or if the bed involved is of the water variety) you tune in to it and know where it’s at even when you’re sound asleep (this attunement is one of the things that help form good attachments which add to the parent-child bond). If you don’t co-sleep regularly you won’t have this attunement and this are more likely to accidentally smother.

The poor mother may have been exhausted and not been able to tell where the bub was at, it might have been a water bed that it sank into, the bub might have had some underlying issue and would have died even if it had been in a cot, but then it wouldn’t have made the news coz cot death is, sadly, quite normal.

I feel for the mother who lost her baby.

I hate the media fucktards who vindicate co-sleeping and anything else they can vindicate to try to make a story interesting. They don’t give a shit about presenting a balanced viewpoint or even facts. So they can all get fucked.

(apologies to the parentage if they’re reading this…I can’t think of a nice way to put that)

Now onto other things.

Tiny was a bit on the cranky side today, he spent a fair bit of time either chewing on my shoulder, my finger or his teething ring. I had to feed him to sleep a couple of times, one of those times he didn’t even feed really, just had my nipple in his mouth til he dozed off. I rocked him to sleep a couple more times and the other time he went to sleep by himself. He didn’t stay asleep for too long each time, the longest was for about an hour. I couldn’t do anything or go anywhere without him crying, the second I turned my back on him he’d start screaming.

He also pulled the wickedest prissy face today :) It was so damn cute. Didn’t result in tears though. Also had my fair share of laughs with him (he’s laughing now playing with Josh), playing all his favourite games with him and trying to discover some new ones. His neck and back are a lot stronger so we can do more stuff with him, like introducing the flying game :) Though the flying game may explain why his feet lift up when he raises his head when on the ground ;)

We bought a 12-pack of new nappies today. The original 36 cloth nappies we have were factory seconds and they worked pretty good, the 12-pack was of the same brand as the seconds but obviously the full price saleable stuff, so they cost $50 for 12 rather than $30. They are amazingly wonderfully soft (Tiny’s gonna love em). And seeing as a full load of nappies is about 30 nappies, we now have many spare and are able to do a full load without running out :)

Beats doing prissy little waste of water and electricity half loads.

Lamb and vege soup for dinner :)

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License