Something I've had on my mind a lot recently is a topic I remember being a hot one at the weekly parents' education classes my wife Janice and I attended when Lofton was in pre-school. Not long before he turned three we joined a co-op, where twenty families worked together with two certified early-childhood education professionals, trying to arrive at our best understanding of how children develop and what we might do to set our kids on the path to Life's best opportunities.

Part of the commitment required to join the co-op included serving at the school one day a week, to help watch over the children as they went about their "work," which, as Lofton grokked early-on (and continues to remind me some five years later) is "to play." Once a month, each family also had to provide a healthy snack for all the children and adults at the school on a day different from their regular at-school work day. These work and feeding commitments may not seem much on the surface, but in a town where the single-income family is an endangered species, we all found it challenging to meet them from time to time.

What may have been the most difficult - for us adults, anyway - was the weekly meeting/education class, where we took care of the business of running the school and, with the assistance of the two educators, delved deeply into the many intricasies of child development and family health. The co-op is committed to diversity, which meant twenty families who brought a sometimes ungainly spectrum of  influences, beliefs, experiences and expectations to the community. For three years, Tuesday nights were a guaranteed leap into the deep end of the emotional pool.

One of the things that came up early on and something people seemed to have definite opinions about, was the concept of "the Family Bed." How OK is it to have children sleeping with their parents and for how long? When is the right time and what is the best way to get children used to sleeping in thier own beds? Crying, sickness, betwetting, bad dreams, lack of parental sleep, lack of parental privacy, control issues, punishment, reward  - we went mano a mano with a panoply of issues and ideas, on which everyone seemed to have a different opinion and to which there seemed no right answer.

As with many issues in Life that get a lot of people riled up, I sought guidance from my heart on the matter of Lofton sleeping with us and resolved for myself to pay attention to the signals he gave at bedtime to determine what would be best for him, and for us. It was pretty easy when he was little, except for those first weeks of  his life, when I was sure Janice or I would roll on top of him in the middle of the night and unknowingly suffocate our little bean. Once we got over the terror of finding ourselves in completely uncharted waters, it was easy  for me to  fall asleep amid the pure bliss of listening to my own child breathing deeply, content, and secure, and at rest.

We moved him to a crib in his own room at about four or five months, if my recollection is correct, and some of my favorite times were spent sitting on the floor by the crib singing him softly to sleep. Janice and I enjoyed the oportunity to reconnect as a couple, too, during this period, for a half year or so, until he learned to climb out of the crib and make his way back into our bed during the middle of the night.

All through pre-school he mostly ended up in our bed, though there were times when he had a particularly exhausting day physically and slept through the night in his own room. The summer before he started kindergarten, we got him a big-boy bed and virtually every night, except when one or the other of us might be out of town, Janice or I would read with him and he would fall asleep in his room. Sometimes he slept the night through, sometimes he ended up with us.  It didn't ever seem to bother or matter to me and luckily Janice felt the same way. I guess if one or the other of us  had felt differently it would have caused a problem, and I'm glad we never had to confront it.

As Lofton got older, he slept more nights through in a row and by this past school year - in 2nd grade - he was even starting to willingly go to bed without one of  us lying down to read with him first. 

He still wakes up in the middle of the night and crawls into bed with us on occasion, though. And now that he's getting bigger, even though we sleep in a king-sized bed, I'm no longer under any illusion that I could accidentally smother him.

Sometimes, when I wake in the middle of the night and notice him there, or when I rise early in the morning to slip out of bed and start my day, I still relish the incomparable joy of listening to him breathe deeply, content, and secure, and at rest.