As promised, here is the guest post from Alissa over at Mommy and Molly. Alissa is a dedicated, hard-working gal who manages to care for an adorable baby girl, Molly, while juggling the life of a work-at-home-mom. Make sure you check out her blog! And her Twitter feeds are great, too! Her handle is @MollyandMommy. Thanks for treating us to a guest post, Alissa!
My little girl is 8 months old and has yet to sleep through the night (okay, maybe she has once....but that's it).
A lot of people ask me how she sleeps, and when I respond with "She wakes up 3-4 times a night" they look at me like I just told them my dog died. Seriously. It's like people think that as soon as a baby is past a certain age they should be sleeping all night.
Does it bother me that I do not get much sleep? Not really. I do not mind it because I stay at home with her and can take a nap if need be. Have I considered sleep training/Cry it Out/Ferber....etc? Yes. But you see, I am not your typical new mom. I bed-share, baby wear, breast feed....I practice Attachment Parenting, and I love it.
Before Molly was born, I thought I would NEVER be an Attachment Parenting mom. I thought those mothers breastfed their children until they were 8 and found it a strange way of parenting. Little did I know how central it would become in my life.
From the moment Molly was born, I did not want her to be away from me for one second. She stayed in my hospital room, slept on me in the hospital bed and when I got her home, she stayed in bed with me. I wore her in my Moby when she cried and it calmed her down. I thought I would only breastfeed until she got her first tooth---she now has three teeth and I am still nursing.
There are so many things I thought that parenting would be before I actually had a child, and Molly has proved all of it wrong...and then some. What is funny is I continue to think that way....in that "Oh, I will never spank Molly" "She will be weaned by the time she is one"...etc. When in reality, I have no clue what the future holds.
It can only be good things though, right? Like her sleeping through the night.
I can only hope.
