How important is sleep? Really, how important?

 Peighton, my beautiful five month old, has the lovely habit of waking up just enough to start fussing and not stop until she is put on the boob.  She has gotten so used to having a boob to fall asleep that she requires it to be easy access all night long.  This means that she spends a lot of the night in bed with me.  Now before I get any comments on it, yes, I am co-sleeping with my baby part of each night, and no, it is not unsafe.  My husband and I have taken the necessary steps to make sure that our bed is safe for our baby to be in it with us.  Seeing as how my baby is boob dependent, I have become an all night drive through.  This is problematic when it comes to getting any normal amount of sleep of any real meaning.  Matter of fact I hear my husband coming down the hall with her now, grumbling that I need to come to bed so she can have a boob to go back to sleep...pardon me my public awaits...There, all is well with the world, where was I?  Oh yes, sleep. 

I have come to the conclusion that Peighton's inability to sleep through the night yet is of my own doing.  I have allowed for some bad habits to form that have taken over my night life. 

1.  This being my second baby in a very short timespan, my sleep is precious to me and I have taken to getting it anyway that I can.  This means when she wakes up the first time, I get up put her in bed next to me, hook her up and pass back out. 

2.  The next time she stirs, we shift to the other side, hook back up and pass out again. 

Thus goes most of every night, aside from the occasional bought of baby gas in which case I spend most of the night walking back and forth in the dark praying for her to have one good fart and go back to sleep. 

To put this all in perspective, my husband and I followed the No Cry Sleep Solution  with our first baby, Maggie Leigh, who is now 20 months old.  It is not an overnight solution and takes time for everything to fall into place and effort on the part of the parent.  However it is entirely possible to have your baby asleep in their own bed for 11-12 hours a night (in a row), WITHOUT letting them "cry it out".  Following the guidelines in that book beginning at 4 months old, which is the earliest you should start sleep training by the way,  Maggie Leigh was in bed at 7:30pm every night and asleep till 7:30am the next morning without so much as a peep by 6 months old.  In fact my daughter absolutely loves her bed, she loves to be in it and gets excited when it is bedtime.  I know, weird right?  The coolest part is that there was no drama, no tears, and no painful evenings of listening to your baby cry and just aching to pick them up.  I love that book.

However, Peighton is 5 months old and is nowhere near the progress that we had with her big sister at that point.  And yes, it is all my fault.  I have been a little too lazy to follow all of the guidelines that we did the first time and have been blaming it on being too exhausted to do it.  While that is partly to blame, there is another factor in all of this.  I am not sure that I want to yet.  That is right I said it, I am not sure that I want to transition my baby from my bed to her own and have her away from me at night yet.  Due to a whole litany of reasons, my husband Jim and I decided that Peighton would be our last baby.  Knowing that, it makes it hard to give up the moments that I am sharing with my baby right now, because it is all too soon that these moments will be gone forever.  So it may be a few more weeks before I buckle down and try to break my baby of her boob habit, and transition her into her own bed with her sister.  Getting more sleep at this point is not as important to me as treasuring every one of these moments that I have before I can not get them back.  Sleep can wait, I have my whole life to sleep.