The last time I felt this way was when Waverly started having her breath holding spells. I felt like I sort of thought I knew everything about my kids. I’ve NEVER claimed to be an expert, but having five kids, I must’ve subconsciously figured nothing would surprise me anymore.
Last night, we had the pleasure of experiencing another first.
“Pleasure.”
I woke up bleary eyed in the middle of the night to someone crashing around my room. Usually, when a kid comes into our room, they try to call us quietly from the door, and eventually approach our bed, my side, and wake me up. Not this time. We don’t have a ton of junk in our room, but there was a hamper and a couple of boxes along one wall, and whoever was in our room was running into everything.
I saw a silhouette from the doorway. Hair. Rowan. Of course it was Rowan. He is our “wake the whole house in the middle of the night” kid. It isn’t unheard of that he would be there.
Except, lets be real. He’s been up there enough in the dark that he knows exactly how to get to our bed.
As I continued waking up, I heard him breathing fast and making whiny sounds. He sounded upset. And he was moving fast. He hit every box, tripped over everything, and slammed into my desk. Still, he kept going. I called for him and reached out my hand to bring him to me, but he wouldn’t respond. As my eyes adjusted, I could see he was reaching madly in front of himself, as though looking for something. Maybe just trying to get somewhere? But I was calling to him, and he wouldn’t come.
I asked him what was wrong, and he answered “Ummm ummm ummm… I’m really scared.” He continued crashing into things, just out of my reach. He was completely panicking. Once he had verbalized that he was scared, he kept saying it over and over and over again. I finally reached him and caught his hand. He didn’t immediately come to me, though. I sort of pulled him over to me and grabbed him into a hug. And he completely deflated. He was fine, and still, and safe.
He was sleepwalking. Of course that was it.
I held him for a nice long time. When we eventually released our hug, he wasn’t panicking anymore but he was definitely not all there. I know enough about sleepwalking to know you’re not supposed to wake the person from their sleep, and I assumed I had done just that, but he was SO upset, I couldn’t imagine how else to solve the problem and help him!
Brady ushered him back to bed, and said he still seemed quite disoriented, which made good sense. But Brady and I were UP after that! We watched a couple of episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine before we got tired enough to go back to sleep. Thank goodness it was just after 1:00am and not closer to the time we’d actually need to get up.
As you can imagine, I was pretty eager to get Rowan up this morning. As soon as I opened the door, he greeted me, happy as a clam! I asked him how his night was and he said it was good! He said he felt really rested and happy. His exact words were “No scary thoughts or anything!”
So 🤷♀️ That happened! And he has no idea! I’ve been suspicious of Rowan sleepwalking before, but its never gone beyond him standing in his doorway when we’re up late, and us walking him back to his bed. This was its own thing! Not my favorite thing, lol, but a good reminder that there are still plenty of surprises left to come my way!
Oh my goodness, Hailey! This might be night terrors! Arthur has had them since he was 2. He has them quite regularly, but there are certain things that can trip them to happen like getting out of routine, and other things. Anyways, they used to absolutely terrify us! But we are so used to them now. You might want to look up common symptoms. It often involves kids screaming about something hurting or being scared. They can yell or scream or cry and run around and everything! With Arthur, we now know “the cry” and you can tell he isn’t actually awake because his eyes don’t look “right.” Until he can answer “do you know my name?” And he can say either mom or dad, we know he isn’t out of it yet. They usually last between 20-30 minutes and there’s not much you can do except keep him safe. Arthur won’t let us comfort him at all until he “snaps out of it.” And another trait is they don’t remember a bit of it when they wake up. Might be something to check out!