Natural Transitioning from Co-sleeping

I've been a proud co-sleeping mother by every sense of that phrase for nearly 3 years. In fact, to be exact, JUST under 2 years and 11 months.

As with everything having to do with 'parenting' my son, it's been a journey. We started with a Snuggle Nest after falling prey to the horror stories of parents rolling onto their tiny babies and smothering them to death. After the first four hours of sleeping our own bed, the baby was brought onto my partners stomach in a sort of cuddle sleep, and the Snuggle Nest was abandoned forever as essentially useless. T refused to sleep in any longer, and both my partner and I found that we were fully confident that there was no logical way that either of us would EVER be able to sleep so soundly that we would unconsciously smother our baby.

We also forewent the warnings about pillows, comforters, and whatever else is warned about in the common co-sleeping literature. I'm not sure I'd go ahead and vote that that's the 'safest' way to co-sleep, but again, it's one of those things that we gradually became ok with.

By the time he was 9 months or so, I was beginning to wonder how we'd ever get him OUT of our bed. I still enjoyed our sleep together, but at times it was frustrating. T tended to sleep in the middle of the bed, and he also tended to take over the entire bed in that way of small children. I wanted to be able to cuddle against my partner, but alas, there was always a flailing hot little body preventing me.

This past August, T and I entered into a mutual weaning. I'm not even so sure how it 'happened' anymore, but whatever the cause, or how we did it, within a week or two, he was completely weaned without fuss. We spent lots of time cuddling more directly in bed, and he slept EVEN closer to me than he had in the past. Which, at the time, I enjoyed because some vital bit of our bonding experience had come to an end, and I wanted reasurance that we were still just as close.

Fast forward to the present day, and T has slept in his own bed, of his own choice for the past 4-5 nights. ALL night I should add. It seems like such a natural transition that I laugh to think that at some point in the past I'd actually devoted attention to the how's and why's of this happening. His 'bed' is just a futon couch moved beside our own bed, but he's possessive about it in a way that lets me know this is probably 'for real'. He's ready to have his own sleeping space. And for the first time in nearly three years, I'm getting uninterrupted sleep. Which, is something I'd given up on years ago!