Dealing with night terrors

Talia had her first experience of what we are fairly sure was “night terrors” recently.

She woke us up around 11:30pm screaming and inconsolable. She was acting as if she didn’t recognise us, and could not be comforted with the usual things (cuddle, snugglebunny, drink). She didn’t want to be held and slumped on the floor coughing as if she was trying to vomit, in between the screaming. She’s not normally a screamer so it was quite scary for us. It didn’t actually sound as if she was in pain, just really really upset, but we were getting very worried that she wasn’t responding to us and ended up calling health direct because we had no idea what we should be doing.

Once we’d checked off all the symptoms (or lack of them) it seemed that night terrors was the likely scenario. So around midnight all 3 of us sat on the loungeroom floor and watched one of her favourite videos for 40 minutes, which was sufficiently distracting to stop the screaming and give us a chance to check for any further odd behaviour etc before putting her back to bed. Then once she’d settled in the usual way she was fine for the rest of the night.

I was really glad my husband was back from overseas, if I’d been dealing with that by myself I’d have been a wreck.