A couple months ago I wrote that I was having a tough time getting my two-year-old Briani to sleep in her crib. I had bed broken my two older kids so even though my wife was against it, I thought I would be able to persist enough that I would manage to officially get our toddler to sleep in her bed.
Well, it turns out Briani won this battle. After two years of battling my wife and toddler about this issue I gave in to her. Briani’s cuteness is so hard to fight now that she’s talking that for the the foreseeable future Briani’s back in our bed to stay.
The fact is that I actually love sleeping with all my children. I don’t know if this is a Latino father thing or not but occasionally I even like to cuddle up with my 10-year-old Jonathan or my six-year-old Elena. This is a concept I know well because when I was a boy I grew up sleeping every week day with my grandparents Manolo and Margarita. Even during the weekends, when I was at my dad’s house, I would often sleep with him or with my other grandmother Micaela.
It took my brother Mario’s perspective to help change my mind about Briani. He too used to sleep with my grandparents and me when we were little and he said it was comforting to him. That’s largely why he feels very comfortable having my five year-old niece Mia sleep with him and my sister in law every day. Like us, they can temporarily put Mia somewhere away from their room when they need their privacy but not at sleeping time. In fact Mario told he loves having Mia with them in their queen size bed so much that even though they sleep like sardines they don’t plan to kick her out. Until she’s 7!
“Sseven years old? Are you kidding me, Mano?”, I asked him. Mario said he wasn’t not and oddly enough, the more my bond grows with my own little “Frescura”, (one of Briani’s many nicknames) the more I understand my brother.
“It’s that she’s so cute when she sleep with us,” my brother says. “You can only do this until they grow up, so why not?”
The other day I caught myself watching Briani sleeping next to us. Our daughter looked so sweet next to my wife that I finally said the same thing my brother said to me, “Why not?”
I’m not sure what other family experts may have to say about this topic but as for my wife and I we’re going to stick to letting out little Frescura sleep with us. Maybe until she’s five though. I don’t think we could do seven years of this.
What do you think?