Night terrors suck
For those of you that are not familiar with this occurrence, it is when your child wakes up about 90–120 min or so after going to sleep and is uncontrollably sobbing or screaming. It is not to be confused with nightmares but it related to sleepwalking. People who have no experience with night terrors think you are torturing your child. When actually you are so upset to the core of your being because all you want to do (and what you’ve been physiologically built to do) is to protect you child!! And there is NOTHING you can do. Well at least nothing to really make it stop. You can keep them from flinging themselves off the bed. Or sit there and sob right along with them because you are f-ing exhausted.
It is a very strange thing as well. Our little girl has had them since she was 18 months old. They usually don’t start till a child is 3 or 4 years old. The internet lists all these reasons for them (which is partly it’s way of saying “I have no idea what really causes it”). For us, we found that the only thing that caused it with our little girl, with any regularity, was skipping or being short on her midday nap. (Not travel, not new beds, not anything else.) Now that she’s older, she has been skipping the nap sometimes but didn’t yesterday and she hasn’t had a night terror in a long time so it was unexpected. And since I was up late the previous night (see previous post), I was hosed.
This is how it went: 10:56 she’s sobbing, go into her room, more sobbing, not sure if she is awake but is partially responsive, I ask if she wants to go to or room, she nods (*this is where I made the mistake, I should not have moved her but we had a guest and I wanted to settle her fast, unfortunately moving made it go longer), I carry her in, more sobbing, she tries to lay down and then sits up again, jerking her legs frustratedly and more sobbing, in the middle of the sobbing I get a muffled “bbbbbhook!”, so I grab a book and read and she settles down, and I almost think she will get back to regular sleep again, and she’s sitting up and sobbing and flailing, says her legs hurt, I massage them, husband gets some children’s meds for her in a cup (which she can normally handle but you see, she’s not fully awake), switches to syringe for meds, more flailing, he moves to her room for sleep (smart man), she’s cries and says her tummy hurts, I’m just trying to hold her now but I’m so painfully exhausted and I’m still pretty sure that she’s not quite awake because she is very verbal normally and she’s sobbing still, saying one or two words, and then throws herself into child’s pose. We finally fell asleep.
It’s 11:26pm and I just heard her whimper. Please, please stay asleep.
