When Adrianna was sick with H1N1 a few weeks ago, Greg toted her old crib mattress upstairs from the basement and put it on the floor in our bedroom so we could keep an eye on her overnight.
Even though she is fully recovered, the mattress has still been seeing a lot of use from Adrianna. She will wake up in the middle night and claim that she had a bad dream and she’ll ask if she can sleep with us. How can we say no? Plus, both Greg and I really do like having our entire family in the same room. Somehow it feels extra safe and we like having Adrianna nearby. Having the mattress in there has really helped us to still be able to get a full night’s rest too since Adrianna tends to be quite wiggly and being pregnant, I have a hard enough time getting comfortable without having a warm little wiggly body pressed up to my back all night. (Another reason why the dogs have also been banned from our bed as of late, even though they don’t wiggle as much as they are just floppy, dead-weight and won’t move when I need them to.)
Adrianna’s bad dreams were starting to get so common as of late that I was beginning to wonder if they were made up so she could come join us in our room. But last night’s must have been particularly scary, as she woke up with scared, panicky crying. When I asked her about her dream, she told me there was a hawk and it thought she was a bug but she wasn’t really little. Poor thing. I think she may have gotten that from the Tinkerbell movie as there was a hawk that chased Tinkerbell. Adrianna had later asked me if hawks will get people and I told her that it only wanted Tinkerbell because she was tiny like a bug. We also saw a hawk circling over a prairie dog town recently and talked about hawks then too.
So I let her crawl into bed with us for about half an hour so we could cuddle with her. Then, when it was clear her wiggling wasn’t going to stop anytime soon, she was sent back to her special bed on the floor.
I remember when I was about Adrianna’s age I spent a lot of nights on the floor in my parents’ room (or in the bed when they’d let me). I even still remember some of the bad dreams that drove me in there. Probably just a normal phase that she’ll grow out of.
You know Layla has had night terrors since she was an infant. It is pretty scary, and i imagine the things that little kids see and can’t quite understand fully are switched into something really scary. Layla will wake up screaming, but when we go in there to check on her, she is sitting up and looking into her eyes she is not awake..not there, you can see in her eyes that shes someplace else. it is scary to me that it takes quite sometime to snap her out of this dream.
Adrianna has night terrors too. They are frightening for Greg and I, because there is absolutely nothing you can do to snap her out of them. We just try to talk to her and hold her and keep her safe until she “wakes up” on her own. But yeah, those are weird. She looks awake but isn’t.
These bad dreams are a separate thing. Adrianna never can tell us what caused her to cry out when she has a night terror.