Our family?s sleeping arrangement has generally left everyone tired. In our hundred-year-old storey-and-a-half bungalow, two bedrooms are nestled in the joists of the house reachable by a steep set of fir-topped stairs. Over the course of three pregnancies, I cursed these stairs as I traversed the narrow treads to the washroom in the middle of the night.

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How to stop co-sleeping: An age-by-age guideBy that time, I was also generally cursing the children as one or two and later even all three made the short trek from their shared room to our bed. Over time, my husband Mat and I tired of sleeping at the edges of our double bed, rail straight, trying to escape the small elbows and feet, so we bought a foam king-sized mattress that fit into our room. Literally. It was a wall- to-wall bed leaving no one at risk of falling off the edge. However, after a time we changed our minds again. Even with a king-size, our blankets were incrementally removed from our bodies by rolling children and we realized that no matter how much room we had, our warm bodies were nectar feeding their hunger for touch. We would wake up with our cheeks pressed against the wall, a child?s drool-encrusted cheek stuck to our back and a yawning canyon space in the centre. In a fit...