kids

Meet Lucy, the mum who shares a bed with her husband and two daughters every night.

Lucy Aitken Read describes herself as a “writer, mama, activist and vintage lover” — all the good things in life.

Yet she’s also different to your “average mum” in certain ways.

Every night, Lucy and her family go into one king bed and sleep together. She and her husband have co-slept with their girls, aged five and three years old, ever since they were born.

Writing on her blog, the mum says that in her “gut” she knew co-sleeping was the right thing for her.

“We are partaking in a healthy, ancient sleep tradition. We all bunk together in a loft, with a super king and a single pushed together to make one enormous sleeping platform,” Lucy wrote.

For most mums, sleeping with their kids usually means being kept awake all night, but Lucy says she actually gets a better sleep.

If Romano or Juno, her daughters, are fitful they get comforted in her presence and so she isn’t up and down during the night. She also says co-sleeping means you’re parenting while sleeping, safe, and family bonding.

Scroll through for more from Lucy. Images via Instagram. (Post continues after gallery.)

Of course, we’re naturally curious how Lucy magically manages to fit a whole family into one bed (and still get sleep).

“The four of us just sleep in a massive bed – the biggest bed you’ve ever seen with a million pillows. And, we all just tumble in there every night and sleep together, and we’ve done that for five years,” she said in a Youtube video.

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The prospect of having her kids sleep with her was something Lucy and her husband vowed they would never do.

“Then, basically, my daughter was born and I was like, ‘There’s no way she’s going to sleep in another room’,” she explains.

Lucy decided from the beginning that she wanted to parent in the way – attachment parenting – which would cause the least amount of stress for her kids.

The hardest thing she says about co-sleeping isn’t the act itself, but what Lucy calls is “battling” people who think she isn’t normal.

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A photo posted by Lulastic & the Hippyshake (@lulasticblog) on

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“The emotional weariness that comes from battling convention because it’s not very normal… sometimes people can make you feel bad,” she writes.

Lucy is also still breastfeeding her three-year-old Juno consistently, and her five-year-old, Ramona, when she needs.

Recently, Lucy wrote she was slowly weaning Juno off breastfeeding, after having tired breasts, but the children find it incredibly soothing.

“When I bring the topic up [stopping breastfeeding] she [Ramona] vehemently declares she isn’t finished with it… ‘I’m going to have Mummy Milk ‘till I am FIFTEEN!’ she wrote.

Despite the length of time she has been breastfeeding, the mum never expected it to go on this long, and she refuses to shame mums who don’t breastfeed.

“If you detect any lactating smuggery in this post, please don’t. I understand that for all sorts of reasons this path isn’t for all… and it has been a rocky one for us at times.”

You can read more of Lucy here or follow her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube, or Instagram.