...don't come back another day! Alright everyone, we need help. We're pretty sure that Lyla has nightmares. Frequently. Maybe even night terrors. We kept a good friend's baby overnight a few years ago and had our first experience with a night terror around 2am. Poor Keaton, he could not wake up but was crying and crying. It broke our hearts. Little did we know that similar experiences would be in our future. Lyla wakes up once or twice every night with a whimpering cry. It doesn't last long, but it's enough to wake us up. It's very immediate and sudden, and full of fear. I know that's a horrible way to describe it, but the whimpering quality is just sad. Occasionally, Lyla wakes up in a full-fledged cry with screaming and whimpering. It's so sad to listen to and it makes me hope that she's not scared. Since she can't tell us her feelings I always worry that something frightened her. So naturally, because I am who I am, I began researching infant nightmares. I can't find anything related specifically to infants and causes/predominance/etc. There is a ton of information about toddlers and nightmares or night terrors but not infants. Here's your challenge: help us! Do any of you have experience with this? Lyla is happy and sweet and all of those fun adjectives still, I just hate that I think she has bad experiences at night :-( Any input? Thanks!
July 20, 2014 Afternoon: Well, we moved down the hall to a different ICU room. Our new nurse is like a drill sergeant grandma…sweet but serious. Warning: This is about to get real. If you are offended by foul language, you might skip this post. If you don't like the ugly truth, you might skip this post. So, here's the deal. I've been thinking a lot today about reality. Living in the moment. Not worrying about tomorrow and next week and next month. But that's hard for me. I'm a planner and I have to plan ahead some because I'm here and the girls are being shuffled around and everyone is being so incredibly kind and offering help. It all overwhelms me and I get to a place of feeling like "Screw this, I can't do it. This is shitty. There's just no other way to say it." And then I get a text or a call or a hug that brings me back to a different reality; one in which hundreds of people are rooting us on in th...
We had similar experiences with Xach before he could express himself, then it went away. The nightmares he has now are sort of funny, but not in the moment that he is screaming...like the dancing man or the green bumble bee flying around the room. It does comfort me that his nightmares now are nothing disturbing, so I have to conclude that the early ones couldn't have been that disturbing, either. I also wonder about the link between periods of increased neurological development and nightmares at that age...sort of like leg cramps in a growing boy??
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