Snoozing and Snuggling

Many of you know that we cosleep with our kids. I know I've said it before on this blog, but we really love having our kids with us at night, all snuggled together and cozy. Plus, seriously, it makes my life a bazillion times easier to have the kids right there for any middle of the night incidents. Baby needs to nurse? No problem, I'll just roll over and give her what her little mouth is searching for. Big brother had a bad dream? No big deal, one of us will just scoot over, gather him in our arms for a big snuggle and everyone's back to sleep before you can say nightmare.

Plus, I am one of those people who really, REALLY needs her sleep. Seriously. If I don't get my 8 hours a night, I am a big witch with a capital B. If you don't believe me, just ask David who has had firsthand experience with this for the past eight and a half years. Or better yet, ask my mom, who has been experiencing this for, oh, probably my whole life. Cosleeping helps me get those golden 8 hours of sleep (provided I go to bed early enough...) that I desperately need.

And in addition to helping me get my requisite sleep, cosleeping gives me many, many opportunities to get all sentimental and gushy about my kids, as well as opportunities to laugh. My friend Linda posted a picture a while ago of her three kids all snuggled together asleep, and since then I kept thinking that this blog was long overdue for a post with some of the pictures of my kids all cuddled and snoozing away at night. Kieran insisted on sleeping in his "football" pjs one night, despite the fact that it wasn't really going to be very cold. When we headed back to bed, this is what we found:

LOL! Um, we think he was just a wee bit hot.

Another night we heard Kieran say, "Nuggle" (snuggle) on the monitor and went back to check on the kids and found this:

Typically, our kids sleep on opposite sides of the bed, which seemed like the most natural thing to do when Teagan was a baby. I mean, you don't want your almost-2-year-old rolling onto your newborn... Now that she weighs 2/3 of what Kieran does, I don't think we need to worry about that anymore. :) These pictures just melt my heart. Usually Kieran just wants to snuggle with Mom or Dad, but I think he's officially added Teagan to that list of acceptable snugglers.