Friday, March 7, 2008
Nightmares
I need some advice. I'm pretty sure Jessica has been having nightmares for the past few nights. She'll whimper and whine and sometimes even scream. She ends up waking up earlier than normal. Last night she was up at 3:00am and refused to lay back down. She just wanted to be held and was very jittery. Eventually we got her to sleep in our bed. But a few hours later she started whining and rolling around and breathing all tense. So how do you explain the difference between a dream and reality to a 1 year old? We do our best, but I'm sure she doesn't really get it. The worst is when she's obviously had a nightmare and won't let one of us get anywhere near her. It's like she had a dream that we did something mean and she doesn't understand it's not real. So sad. Any advice would be great.
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4 comments:
Hey Katie used to have "night terrors" I read up on them and found is that the child still is half asleep, even thought they are moving, or walking, yelling and crying. They think they are still in a dream.
So what we found is that you need to try to wake her up. For Katie it was always something different that worked. The first time a shower woke her up, one time Baby Einstein, another it was walk out side with Daddy. I think what worked was a change, the soft music in the movie, the white noise of the shower and the cool out side air. She hated the lights on, and us holding her tight.
It is very scary when you feel they are out of control. After Katie would finally wake up she would usually go right back to sleep.
Good Luck! Katie's "night terrors" lasted about 3 months.
Parker had "night terrors" too for a while. He'd calm down after I got him awake, but like your previous poster, sometimes it was hard. He'd calm down as soon as he was really awake, though. His "night terrors" didn't last too long, just a couple of weeks or so. Good luck!
Laura~ Grace has these all the time, she just wakes up screaming and sometimes won't let Russ or hold her, this has been on going for like three months nw ugh. We have found that turning on the lights right away and talking to her for five minutes or so calms her down, even offering Grace a few sip of water has helped her wake up. Fortunalty she goes righ tback to sleep, I am not sure how effective turning on the lights would be for a child who will wake up and be up. We also sing a lot to her and that helps her out. Goodluck, I know it is hard and you feel so bad for them.
Hi Laura! I went through the EXACT same thing with Azure literally a couple days after Corey deployed. It was EXACTLY how you described what Jessica did. She wouldn't even let us lay her on the floor to change her diaper and she kept crying/screaming about the "ribbit, ribbit" and saying "no ribbit ribbit, no ribbit ribbit!!"...this was very frustrating because she actually LIKES frogs and KNOWS that they say "ribbit, ribbit" so I didn't know what she was scared of. I kept asking her to SHOW me what was scaring her...one day she'd say the closet, one day she'd point to the closet, etc. One thing that helped was that when I put her down to bed I would literally CLIMB into her crib and lay down with her (before getting in we would look in the closet together to make sure there were no ribbit ribbits and we would look under her bed and I would let her feel the carpet to make sure nothing was there either). I also made sure that when we said her night time prayers that we would not only pray to not have bad dreams but would also pray that there would be no ribbit ribbits either. If I ever forgot this part of the prayer she would immediately remind me and we'd say another prayer. Oh, also, Corey suggested letting her watch Monsters Inc which I thought would scare her more but she actually LOVES it now and it is her favorite...she distinguishes between the mean monster and the nice monster and now she'll look in the closet herself and say, "No monsters in here!" because Sulley says that on the cartoon. Something I do now so that Azi isn't scared is I leave her door totally open while she's falling asleep so that she can still hear me and know that I'm close by. Oh, another thing I did while she was having the nightmares (which lasted about 2-3 months) was I put a fan in her room that's a little bit noisy to give her some "white" noise to drown out any other unexpected noises that might wake her and scare her in the middle of the night. Our last house had really old pipes that would make loud banging sounds at all hours of the night and I think that that was one of the things causing the night terrors and I saw significant improvement in that once she had that fan going all the time. On colder nights I just put double jammies on her to make sure she was warm enough. Oh, one more thing I did was INCREASE the number of night lights she had in her room...I put one in every outlet so that there was light all the way around the room so that if she lost her paci in the middle of the night she could easily find it before she woke up all the way and got upset. Okay, sorry that was so much and so random but I just got through what you're dealing with and feel great sympathy!! I hope some of that will help you!! GOOD LUCK!!
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