My baby is 4 months old this week. Some nights, we get great sleep of 5+ hours, but other nights, she’s up every hour. Last night, she woke up every 30 minutes to an hour. By 11:30 PM, I had been awake for 21 hours and was exhausted. My husband took over, and I got a couple of hours of sleep. By 3:45 AM, she was up again, and I was so tired that I just put her in bed with me and curled around her. She slept well, and I took little catnaps while making sure she was still breathing. I feel terrible because we’re at peak SIDS risk, and our mattress is too soft for her. Her head was propped up on my arm, and I removed all the blankets to make it as safe as possible, but I still feel like I put her in danger. I don’t know how to get through the four-month sleep regression on zero sleep, especially since she also needs to contact nap during the day.
Hello! There are safe ways to co-sleep, and you did what you needed to in the moment, so don’t feel bad. I recommend following @happycosleeper on Instagram.
Your baby’s head shouldn’t be propped on your arm, as this increases the risk of positional asphyxiation. @happycosleeper has posts about this. Your baby should lie directly on the mattress.
She also shares tips on what to do if your bed is too soft.
Another excellent account is Cosleepy! Never actually seems to be very…happy, Happycosleeper. Though I do follow both, lol!
Indeed! Additionally, if you have a happy cosleeper on Facebook!
I think more people co-sleep than you might realize. I started co-sleeping with all three of my girls around the 4-5 month mark. It’s either we get some sleep, or mom goes crazy 
.
There are ways to make co-sleeping safer. The Safe Sleep 7 guidelines are really helpful. For us, I use just a fitted sheet on the bed, a pillow for myself, and a small throw blanket that I wrap around myself. The baby sleeps on the inside, and we push the bed all the way to the wall.
The internet, especially Reddit, often pushes the idea that co-sleeping will definitely harm your baby. This is far from the truth and feels like a scare tactic to me. From what I’ve seen, most places outside of North America don’t villainize it the way it is here.
True. The only co-sleeping horror stories I’ve come across are from North America; several European nations encourage safe co-sleeping practices.
Unfortunately not all, in France all the booklets say never sleep in the same bed. The closest I got to hearing about it officially was learning the side-lying nursing position in the hospital, and then saying to another midwife “I feel like I’ll fall asleep using that method”. Midwife “well yeah… that’s the idea”, but then she stopped because no doubt she’s supposed to stick to the official line.
Completely. It seemed wrong to cosleep. Sincerely, I believed I would never do that. which means that for the past five months, we have been cosleeping.
How do you get your babies to co-sleep? My baby doesn’t nurse to sleep and gets fussy after about 45 minutes, likely because my breast is empty. I switch sides, but the same thing happens. I have to rock him to sleep, and if I try to lay him in bed, he wakes up as I climb in. He sleeps okay in his bassinet and crib (he’s 4 months old and has started rolling onto his stomach, which he hates and gets very upset about, taking ages to calm down. He has started doing this in the middle of the night in his crib, but he can’t do it well in his bassinet, so he’s back to sleeping in it). Sometimes, I’m just so tired and want him to sleep in bed with me.
Have you given pacifiers a try?
Since my children are all bottle fed, I would lay down and nurse them to sleep. If that doesn’t work, I’ll get up, bounce, or rock, and after they’re asleep, I’ll lay down with them. That is, I give you a strange shimmy to entice you into bed. I’ll readjust us after the transfer is complete and she has had some time to relax.
It’s true that you need to sleep.
It is far, far safer to fall asleep with your infant in a scheduled, secure sleep environment than to let them fall asleep on a chair or couch at work.
It’s also true that a soft mattress isn’t the best.
Do you intend to sleep with the infant on the floor using any additional beds you may have?
As I did with my first child, I am currently cosleeping with my second. It gives me energy to get through the day and makes the wake-ups much more tolerable.