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Your Baby is a Crazy Active Bed Hog

Before I co-slept with my son, I had no idea how much space an eight pound baby could take up. Seriously, it's like sleeping with two extra adults. Babies tend to sleep sprawled out and they move all the time. Sometimes my son would start out normal and two hours later he'd be laying sideways, halfway down the bed. On top of this babies make a lot of noise, wake frequently and may even kick you. Research shows that very young babies sleep mostly in the REM stage, i.e. the active sleep stage with more dreaming and movements. Luckily, part of this problem will be solved as your little one ages. Older babies start to have more mature sleep patterns with less REM and much more solid sleep time.

Before kicking your baby out of your bed, consider that all this early waking and movement will happen regardless of where your baby sleeps. If he's in a crib and you've got a bedside baby monitor, you'll be kept up just as much, only now you'll be leaping out of bed every half hour or so to check on your baby. The best solution, in my opinion, is to get a larger, preferably close-to-the-floor bed. For example when my son was born we had a smallish bed. After he arrived we quickly learned that babies take the bed over so we got a huge futon and placed it directly on the floor. This helped a lot, giving everyone more space and if someone got pushed off in the night, it was just inches, not feet, to the floor. You also may want to see who your child favors. In my case, my son would kick and push at me all night, and sleep more soundly next to his dad. If your child sleeps better next to one of you, consider something like the Humanity Family Bed which allows a baby to safely sleep on a side vs. in the middle of the bed.