why we chose attachment parenting

Nathaniel has slept so strangely tonight I just can't sleep. Strangely in a mostly good way--he went to sleep at 11 pm and has only gotten up once to nurse. But that's unusual, and my body is up, and so I'm blogging at 5:30 in the morning.

I've been meaning to blog about attachment parenting for a while. It's something I randomly discovered online while I was pregnant, and I am so glad I did.

Attachment parenting has seven basics, seven B's:

1. Birth bonding (bonding with the baby immediately after birth)
2. Breastfeeding
3. Babywearing
4. Bedding near the baby
5. "Belief in the language value of your baby's cry"
6. "Beware of baby trainers"
7. Balance

We did the whole birth bonding thing, and now we've been doing breastfeeding for a full 10 weeks. I wear Baby D pretty frequently in slings and my Moby wrap, and we co-sleep. I always try to remember that he only cries because he needs something, and I find myself ever more wary of those who say to put my baby on a schedule, or let him cry it out, or whatever. I feel great about all these choices, and I think Carl does too.

I picked attachment parenting after a lot of incidental research. I first stumbled across the idea on a random blog my friend sent me to on a day we were both bored. From there, I researched it a lot. For me, right now, this seems like the perfect parenting style. It addresses everything I didn't like about how I was raised, and in a way that I feel is easy and instinctive.

Breastfeeding was hard for the first few weeks, but every day it gets easier and it is one thing I truly cherish about my relationship with my baby. I feel like I wouldn't know him as well as I do without that.

A lot of people gasp in abject horror when they find out that our baby sleeps in our bed with us, but I wouldn't have it any other way. My body has been so attuned to his from the very beginning that there is no chance I would ever roll onto him. It was a million times harder to sleep when he was apart from me, in the hospital.

Attachment parenting isn't a checklist of steps to do or anything like that; it's a guide, or an approach to parenting that is all about helping your kids form an attachment to you.

To me, it's about helping my baby establish trust. I want him to always know that he can come to me and I will help him. To me, that means not pushing him away if he comes to me in the middle of the night with a nightmare when he's older. It means nurturing him with loving touch even when he's not a baby anymore. And right now, it means keeping him close to me always. My body is his natural habitat right now. I am his only source of nutrition, I am the one who reads his cries for what they are, and I am the one who changes and washes all those diapers. I am his safety.

I think we all like it that way.