# Sweating (me) and Poop (baby) While Co-sleeping!



## sugarlumpkin (Dec 20, 2006)

My seven-week-old son sleeps in our bed. I put a waterproof thing on my side of the bed (under the sheet but on top of the mattress pad) to protect the mattress pad and the mattress from all sorts of liquid (breast milk, baby pee, spit up, et cetera). Now it seems I sweat all night long, something I have not done before, and all over the baby. I feel bad about sweating on him! I sleep on my side, kind of curled around my baby, who sleeps with his head at the height of my nipples and his little feet on my thigh. I obviously do not pull to covers above his chest, so essentially I sleep without covers from the waist up. I do not think the sweating can be because I am too hot.

Also, since I put the waterproof thing in the bed, the baby has managed to leak 2 pees and 2 poops from his diaper! None of these messes was on the waterproof pad, so I've been doing a lot of laundry.

Should I just take the waterproof thing out? Do you think that will help the sweating?

Are pees and poops in bed just par for the course with co-sleeping? Anything I can do to protect our bed?

We use disposable diapers.


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## 425lisamarie (Mar 4, 2005)

Well, I never believed it when first DS was newborn, but cloth really does help with blowouts. If you hate the idea of cloth you can always do part time...

I think the plastickyness of the disposables make BM poop slip right off. And I would take the waterproof thing off. Just use something under him, you don't need a whole mattress cover.


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## jillmamma (Apr 11, 2005)

I'd ditch the waterproof pad since it does not seem to help much anyway, and I bet it is what is making you sweat too. Since you use disposables, have you thought about going up a size for nighttimes? When we started getting leaks, that was my cue to go to the next size. If you are that worried about "leaks" you might want to consider sidecarring a crib so that the baby has his own space too.


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## hammas (Oct 19, 2006)

The waterproof pad is probably making you sweat. It certainly made me when I tried using one when ds was a baby.

We also had leaks with disposables. It was funny that we were using cloth diapers during the day but disposables during the night because I thought I would not leak as easily. Then I figured that with disposables leaking almost every night cloth diapers would probably not be any worse. No leaks!


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## iamama (Jul 14, 2003)

I felted a wool blanket for a natural, breathable mattress protector. It works great.


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## swood (Jan 18, 2007)

I have one of those waterproof pads too. it makes me sweat too. i put a towel over it to have a more breathable cloth layer between us and the non-breathable mat. that seems to do the trick pretty well. in time you may not need the mat any more. now that ds is 6 mos, we are both less leaky, and i just have a towel under us to catch any milk, drool, spit, whatever.


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## AmyJayne19 (Nov 11, 2006)

It'll be the waterproof pad that's making you sweat. I have one on my son's bed and if i fall asleep with him, I sweat really bad. They aren't breathable. As for leaky breasts, try putting a few receiving blankets under you. Works for me.


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## NoliMum (Jan 18, 2007)

After getting sick of all the sweat that came from a waterproof cover, I just switched to putting a towel under the baby and me. As for the leakage- I'd try bigger diapers, or maybe a cloth one with extra liners. Is there a time during the night when your baby wakes? Maybe you could be sure to change him then, so that he's not overfilling his diapers. After 8-10 hours of sleep, there's a lot of waste in them!


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## CalBearMama (Sep 23, 2005)

This subject comes up a lot on the EC (Elimination Communication) message boards, because people are having their babies sleep diaper-free and need to make sure the bed is protected from "misses." (If you want to know more about EC, check out www.diaperfreebaby.org, the EC sub-forum of the Diapering forum here at MDC, or the Yahoo group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/eliminationcommunication/)

Anyway, people on those lists have recommended "Protect-a-Bed" mattress covers as an equally-waterproof but less sweat-inducing alternative, although these covers are apparently fairly expensive. Others have recommended putting "chucks" pads just under the baby, or a waterproof pad made by Swaddlebees: http://www.jamtots.com/Swaddlebees-M...1vA3BRypZLEO7E

My own solution involves wool throws I bought at IKEA. Here's a copy of a (very long) message I posted about it on the Yahoo EC board:

_I bought a wool throw for $25 at IKEA. It's not as big as the Army
surplus wool blankets, but it's a nice fabric and not treated with
anything nasty. It was kind of a loose weave, though, so for
waterproofing purposes, I felt like it was necessary to felt it. I
did this by putting it in my washer for a hot wash/cold rinse cycle
with no detergent or anything (felting is caused by the combination
of agitation and temperature change).

The felting tightened up the blanket, so it ended up being about 1/2
its original area. I was then able to cut the blanket in half and
ended up with two decent-sized pads that I thought would cover the
area of the bed that my son generally tends to occupy at some point
during the night.

I water tested the pads, and they did pretty well, but I decided they
could be more waterproof, so I lanolized them. I dissolved some
Lansinoh pure lanolin ointment in a cup of hot water, then mixed that
solution into a tub of warm water, then soaked the wool in it, then
put the wool through a spin cycle in my washer (not a rinse, just a
spin), then hung the wool to dry the rest of the way.

The two wool pads I ended up with were larger than a standard
pillowcase, so I made my own covers for them. I got a yard of fabric
from IKEA for each cover, and I had my grandma sew it into a
pillowcase (yeah, I know I said I made the covers, but I really just
bought the material and left the skill work to the pros). The sewing
was really just a couple of seams, which I could have done myself if
the sewing machine my MIL loaned us hadn't had a totally worn-out
belt thingie.

Now all I have to do is stuff a cover with a wool pad and an
absorbent layer on top of it (cloth diapers, old towel, whatever). Since they're inside the cover, the layers don't come apart during the night. In
the event of wetness, I can switch out the entire thing (and hang the
wool pad portion to air out until the next use), or since the wool
really isn't wet, I can just put the same wool pad inside a clean
cover with a clean absorbent layer.

What I like about this method is the ease of washing. Rather than
washing a whole pad that has three layers sewn together, I can pull
the waterproof component out (which is the bulkiest part) and only
wash the very thin cover and the absorbent layer. However, I imagine
that the pre-made pads that people have recommended are very nice, so
it all depends on how frequently you think there will be misses in
bed that will require laundering your pad.

Other details:

1. We have a full-on vinyl waterproof mattress pad on our mattress,
because my DH insists that it's necessary to protect the mattress. I
hate it, and it makes DS and me sweat like hogs (do hogs really sweat
that much?), so I have put a whole IKEA wool throw on top of it under
the fitted sheet. The wool throw only covers the top 2/3 or so of
the mattress, but that's the part that matters. I didn't felt or
lanolize this wool throw, because it is not serving a true
waterproofing purpose - it's only there to insulate us from the
waterproof mattress pad of doom. And it's fabulous for that - we are
all sleeping much more soundly since I put the wool layer under the
fitted sheet.

2. At least with a boy, pee goes up as well as down, even if he's
wearing underwear or pajama bottoms (although that does help contain
things somewhat). My biggest frustration for a while was that the
top sheet and at least one blanket on top of it (often two blankets)
were getting a big pee spot on them whenever we had a miss in bed.
That's a lot of laundry, and a lot of sheet/blanket wrangling in the
middle of the night. So I came up with the idea to put a wool
blanket on top of the flat sheet, with another flat sheet on top of
that, and additional blankets on top of that if necessary. If DS
pees, only the flat sheet right on top of him will get wet, because
the wool will not absorb the pee or allow it to pass to the layers
above. Then I can just remove the wet sheet and the wool blanket and
still have a dry sheet and blankets in place to cover our shivering
bods. Since my DS never pees more than once during the night, I am
safe leaving it like that, but if you wanted to, you could re-insert
the wool blanket between the new flat sheet and the other blankets,
to protect those blankets in the event of another miss.

Other ideas:

I have done other things at other times, before I figured out a
system I really liked. At one point, I had nothing directly under DS
and instead relied entirely on the waterproof mattress pad to catch
misses. This was nice in the sense that there wasn't a lot of extra
fabric to get twisted around in bed. If DS peed, I would throw
something absorbent on the spot, throw a fleece blanket on top of
that to prevent the moisture from wicking upward to us, and go back
to sleep. By morning, the wet spot would be basically dry, and I
would just air out the bed, launder the things I had thrown on top of
the wet spot, and not really worry about the sheet until the next
time I would have changed the sheets anyway - it didn't smell or
anything. But there were problems with this method - for one, I felt
compelled to wash the big, bulky, takes-forever-to-dry waterproof
mattress pad pretty much every time I changed the sheets, because I
just didn't like the idea of leaving a peed-on mattress pad on the
bed. But more importantly, DS and I ended up sleeping on top of
fleece blankets a lot, which made us both really sweaty and
uncomfortable. So we tried the pad method and never looked back, but
I thought I would pass along this "absorb-the-pee-after-the-fact"
method, because it might work better for you than it did for us._

I hope something in this is helpful. Let me know if you have any questions.


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