We started co-sleeping with our child at age 2 — we get more rest

I’m about to fall asleep when I hear, “Mom! The bee!” I turn to my 2-year-old son, Kirby, who is in the bed next to me. He was almost asleep too. There are no bees. A few days ago, he saw a bee in the pool and he can’t stop talking about it. My husband looks at me from across the bed and we both burst out laughing.

We know this is one of those moments we will remember, which is part of the reason we handed over the in the middle of our bed for a toddler.

He used to sleep in his bed

When Kirby was a baby, past the infant stage but still in a crib in his room, we did a general combination of “Cry until I fall asleep” sleep training and soothing in the middle of the night. But once we moved to a toddler bed, his ability to run out of the room and express anxiety when we left—“Mommy, Daddy, we’re not leaving!”—proved too much for us to bear.

We alternated nights reading “Petit Camion Bleu” and “Good night moon“, playing with his glow-in-the-dark Ninja Turtles, coaxing him to lie down, playing music, petting his head, whispering dreams in his ear. It was adorable. And it took forever.

Most nights he would burst into our room around 2am and climb in bedWe were too exhausted to protest by then.

We were in this semi-acceptable rhythm when my best friend and her 7-year-old son came to visit us for a weekend, and we install an air mattress in Kirby’s room for them. We told him he was going to spend the night with Mom, Dad, and Dogga (his name for our 12-pound terrier-chihuahua mix, Arthur, who takes up about as much space as an adult human), and he smiled, clapped, and jumped into bed.

That was a few months ago and he never left.

We are all sleeping more

Share a bedeven a king-size bed, with a toddler in it, is a test of how many times you can stand being kicked in the face. Arthur, being a toddler, will snap at anyone who pushes him under the covers. Kirby will be about to fall asleep and suddenly start reciting the names of the Ninja Turtles loudly and with great vigor.

But we love it.

Bedtime can still be a battle, but it’s a family battle. We watch old 90s cartoons, read books, wrestle (he loves it when his dad “power bombs” him, WWF-style for toddlers), sing songs, and then the four of us settle in. There’s not as much crying.

Once Kirby is asleep, my husband and I chat quietly, play games on our phones, or read by the light of a reading lamp. Sometimes we roll out of bed and head into the living room for a real adult night in.

But more often than not, we also go to bed. I stop scrolling and relax in the dark, my sweet son curled up next to me, sharing my pillow, his hand reaching out to hold his father’s across the bed. If he has a nightmare, I can easily soothe him with a back rub. And I don’t set an alarm anymore, because I always wake up to a little hand stroking my cheek while he cries and whispers, “Mommy!”

This phase, like all too brief phases of childhood, won’t last forever. We joke that we should rent Kirby’s room on AirBnb in the meantime. Sometimes I worry that we’re setting him up, and ourselves, for a more difficult transition later on, when it’s time for him to sleep alone.

But for now, co-sleeping with our little one means everyone in our family gets more and better sleep, we get to spend more time with our son, and we’ll never miss an important bee update.