night terrors

I took a few days off so we could regroup and try to come up with a better plan to handle our family's growing sleep issues. Of course there's Audrey's continued night wakings: she still wakes up every 1-2 hours, all night long, even now after 11 months. But then, in the past three weeks, Aria also started getting night terrors.

Night terrors is a crazy phenomenon. It goes like this: Aria's in a very deep sleep, but sits up and starts crying - seemingly uncontrollably, and pretty loud. I come in the room, but she doesn't see me. I talk to her, but she doesn't hear me. I reach out to try and hold her, comfort her, anything, but it just makes her more upset and she pulls away like my touch burns her. And it just goes on like that for 15, 20, or even 30 minutes. Then eventually, she just lies back down, whimpering a bit, and then goes back to sleep like nothing ever happened.

The first time it happened, I completely panicked. I had no idea what was going on. I thought she must have had the most terrible nightmare, and I felt so helpless sitting there, totally unable to help soothe her. The second time it happened, Hosanna was with her, and she was pretty close to taking her to the emergency room. When you don't understand what's happening, the whole thing is pretty damn scary.

So, we did some reading, talked to our doctor, and talked to our midwives, and found out just what this is all about. It turns out that:

a) She's not awake at all during these attacks. She's actually in a very deep sleep. She's literally sleeping through the whole thing. The next morning, she won't remember that it happened at all. It doesn't interfere with the amount of sleep she got or anything.

b) It's a hereditary condition. Turns out I had it when I was a kid, too. It affects about 2% of children.

c) It's usually caused by overtiredness.

d) You can prevent the attack by gently waking her up about an hour after she falls asleep, to keep her from slipping too far into the deep sleep cycle during which the attacks happen.

So that's it. The past few nights we've been trying to get her to bed earlier, with modest success. It's much harder during the summer. It's really hard for her to sleep when she knows it's still light outside, no matter how dark we make her room. And, we've been waking her up after an hour. Sometimes that goes better, sometimes it doesn't go so well. For example, tonight when I went in her room, it was really dark in there, and she had moved off the bed and was sleeping on the floor. So I ended up stepping on her. Not exactly a gentle waking. :( She did manage to go back to sleep shortly thereafter, thankfully.

So, once we knew all this, we moved Aria's bed back into her room, and things are a bit more back to normal as far as she is concerned.

As far as Audrey goes, we're just doing whatever we can to keep getting through it - trading off nights, trading off half-nights, trying to get her to last longer between nursing, etc. We're also working on getting a bedtime routine together for her. It's just really hard to get both kids to bed early enough. Audrey's so loud, we literally have to get her out of the house most nights (e.g. take her for a walk around the neighborhood) so she doesn't keep Aria from falling asleep.

We're usually able to get Audrey to bed at a decent hour. But the middle of the night is still pretty rough. When I have her for the night, I'm able to rock her back to sleep fairly easily whenever she wakes up, but it's so hard to put her down without her waking back up. Half the time she ends up just sleeping on my chest for a lot of the night. And of course, when Hosanna has her, she ends up nursing a lot, mainly because Audrey's just so big now that it hurts Hosanna's back too much to walk around with her and rock her all night. We'll see how it goes. I continue to pray that this will get easier when all of her freaking teeth come in.