Middle-of-the-night mothering

I've mostly stopped looking at the time if and when he wakes up in the night. It doesn't matter. These days he's not waking through hunger; I know this because he never eats much breakfast. But last night I know when he woke up because it was around 10.20pm and I was just about to put my book down, switch the light off and go to sleep. Maybe it's teething, which seems to be going on at a low-level all the time at the moment. Maybe he was too hot. Maybe he just wanted a cuddle.

My strategy at the moment is to grab him out of his cot and go back to bed. Yes, that's it. I've given up on the pacing about with him to get him back to sleep so I can gingerly place him back in his cot and hang over the side rubbing his back for what feels like hours before creeping out of the room only to have my knees crack from standing still for so long and him to wake up again. Sometimes I might stick some Bonjela on his gums. Last night he went straight back to sleep. Think he must have just wanted a cuddle, because when I tried to slide him over to the other side of the bed he deftly rolled right back into my arms.

Nine times out of ten my oh-so sophisticated strategy works. If it doesn't I assume something is wrong and give him some paracetamol and maybe a bit of milk to settle him. It's true that I don't sleep as well with him alongside me. But I sleep better than if he was awake and crying. I wish I hadn't taken so much notice of the spirit of the cot death literature, which is to make you think that if you fall asleep in bed with your baby you will kill them. I could really have done with the extra sleep it would have brought in the early days. In fact, research by Dr James McKenna suggests sleeping with your baby means they're actually safer from cot death than they would be in a cot. Check out http://www.cosleeping.org/. But I got little man used to sleeping in a cot early on and I don't think I could get used to co-sleeping all the time now.

I'm sure that you could argue against many of the things contained in the co-sleeping literature from a strict scientific point of view. But when faced with all the contradictory theories of childcare that us modern parents have to negotiate I tend to think: what would I do if I lived in a small hut in the middle of a forest with no TV and no baby books?