mon-mers (monsters)

Aug 27

Posted by: Scott in: blog, caleb isaiah, family, parenting, ramblings

Caleb seems to have night terrors on occasion. I mean as far back as 9 months old. Is that even possible? The first one followed a round of shots that day at his 9 month well baby. I sobbed, thinking surely he was having an adverse reaction to one of the shot cocktails. He screamed and screamed with his eyes shut tight the majority of the time. For the first time in his life, I could not console my baby. A few months passed, and we had another similar episode. At two and a half, I would estimate that he has had about 7 or 8 of these. I happened to get an email from BabyCenter one morning after one of these dreams. It compared and contrasted nightmares vs. night terrors. After probing a little deeper on alternate websites, I came up with the following: Nightmares frequently occur in the latter part of the sleep cycle, close to wake up time. The child wakes up fearful and can remember the dream. With night terrors, they seem to more often occur early in the sleep cycle, within the first few hours of falling asleep. The child may appear to be fully awake, with eyes open, but cannot be consoled, and is actually still sleeping and dreaming. In the morning, the child will not remember anything. Caleb fits the second bill to a tee. Sometimes his eyes are shut tight (not in a restful state, but squeezed tight), sometimes they are open, but he appears to look straight through us, never making eye contact. He is very fearful of his surroundings, as if he is seeing things that we obviously aren’t. And nothing, I mean nothing we do helps. We talk to him, rock him, hold him, hug him, I even got him to take a sip of water last night. But he just sobs. It takes 10-15 minutes (has taken over 30 before) to get him to stop crying. Then another 10-15 to regulate his breathing again from crying so hard. I asked him this morning, if he remembered having a bad dream last night. He said yes, and when asked what it was about, he said ‘boo-boo’ but I have no idea whether he understood the question. But he wakes up just as happy go lucky and full of energy as he does any other morning. I, on the other hand, look like I’ve been raised from the dead. After a night of being woken up, stressed out, and kicked in the gut for the remainder of night, I feel drained for the rest of the day. The pediatrician’s solution? Put child to bed (did I mention this takes up to an hour most nights?). Determine approximately how far into sleep cycle dream occurs. Go in and wake child up before this point. When child returns to sleep, they will fall asleep in a different sleep cycle, thus skipping the time when the dream would normally occur. Um yeah. That sucks. Got any other ideas?

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