Essentials 5/10

I remember reading a list such as this when I was pregnant. It helped me a bit and also made me conscientious, during Ev’s first year, of our needs. Without further ado (since it’s 3 months late anyway. Who am I to make my readers wait?)… I present the ten things we could NOT live without for our first year of parenthood. I’ll post them one at a time because they’ve turned into quite lengthy little guys!

10. Co-sleeper. As most of you know, I am a Pediatric Intensive Care nurse. I see a lot of really sad, tragic stuff on a daily basis. It’s a wonder I don’t make Everett wear a helmet for his daily risky behaviors (such as walking, bathing, and eating.) I vowed to never, ever let my infant sleep in our bed. I’m not going into detail because we’ve all heard the horror stories but, guys, I will say it happens all the time to good parents. When Ev was still waking every 3 hours throughout the night to nurse, he was in the pack-n-play beside my bed. Around 10 weeks, he started sleeping through the night. I remember him getting a set of shots that made him run a fever. I was too nervous to put him ALL THE WAY IN HIS NURSERY (ummm. about 19 steps away.) We put this co-sleeper in the bed between us and he was protected. Also, I was able to wake up throughout the night and check on him. He got three ear infections between 6 and 11 months causing high fevers and we did the same thing. Another way we used it was when we’d travel. Instead of taking the whole pack-n-play, we’d just make sure the hotel was giving us a king size bed and put him between us. I’m not real sure why we were so picky about it in the hotel as we only have queen size at home. Anyway, with this, I felt like he was always protected from us while still allowing him to sleep in our bed on occasion. It has rigid, padded sides about halfway down. You cannot roll over this unless you are comatose (and if you are comatose and rolling you need to be in a medical study.) The only negative is that it's only about 24 inches long and has a rigid, padded foot rest. After only a couple months, our boy was propping his feet on top of the foot rest because he was too long. We finally just gut a slit in the side of the foot thing and pulled out the rigid piece, allowing the bottom to just lie flat.

Our model at a few months old: