Lux et umbra vicissum…

light and shadow by turn…

Lux et umbra vicissum… header image 2

Teddy Bears and Night Terrors

October 11th, 2004 · No Comments

We’ve named Branwen’s teddy bear Geronimo because he jumps out of the crib so often.

Speaking of jumping out of bed, every once in a while Alexis has a terrible middle of the night. A few hours after going to sleep she’ll start fussing and crying, often pretty loudly. When we go in to try to help she doesn’t seem to be awake, but we can’t wake her up either. Generally, we spend a half hour or so trying to either wake her up or get her back into a restful sleep, and she spends that time in an odd sleep state crying and sometimes screaming (especially in response to various attempts at waking her up such as tickling). This happened again Saturday night and Joel brought it up in Sunday School the next morning. Our friend Stacey was there, and she spoke up and said it sounded like a night terror. Stacey is a physician’s assistant, so she generally knows what she’s talking about on medical matters. 🙂 Anyway, the fact that these episodes occur more often when Alexis is sick than at other times would support Stacey’s theory since night terrors (from what I’ve read) tend to happen more often if a person is overtired or stressed, both of which would be true when she’s sick. I’m going to call it a theory until I talk to our pediatrician about it. We’ll see him this Thursday for Alexis’ three year well check.

The girls both have colds again and so do I. The Lord was good and kept them well for a little over a month. That’s the longest Branwen has ever been well at a stretch. 🙂 Now we’re back to giving three to four breathing treatments a day to keep the coughing at bay, then giving various cold-relieving medicines plus setting up the humidifier at night. It’s a pain, but we’ve gotten pretty used to the routine.

We had fun on Saturday when my parents, my sister Bridgette, and her husband Kevin came to help us celebrate Alexis’ birthday. They came a day early since it would be harder to come on Sunday what with church and whatnot. Alexis got her first tricycle and she loves it. 🙂 She won’t use the pedals yet, but I’m trying to give her a little time on it each day so she can learn. It plays music, too (“Care Bears are coming to your town…”). I’m glad it’s an outdoor toy. 😛

Kevin will be off to Germany soon, so I think this was the only time the girls will get to see him before he leaves. Bridgette will be able to join him as soon as housing is worked out. The base info says it will only take zero to four weeks, but the letter they received said eight, so we’ll see, I guess. I hope for their sakes that he’ll get housing quickly. They were apart for a while already while he finished up training.

Time to go upstairs and finish getting the girls in bed. It’s late for them (9:15-ish as I type), but breathing treatments took a long time tonight with two meds instead of the normal one. Well, maybe they’ll sleep in tomorrow morning. Yeah… right. 🙂

Tags: Drivel