Hello all,
My 19 month old has had 3 separate events that sort of resemble night terrors, and I'm looking for some insight.
The wife and I decided sleep training was the way around a year old, and generally he sleeps through the night fully now - but three times in the last few weeks, this event set will happen:
He will wake up standing in his crib screaming as if he's being hurt, when we go to check on him he's inconsolable so after checking him for bodily harm, I bring him to bed with us with a bottle screaming the whole way. After a few minutes of thrashing about, he sits up and looks around, seemingly confused about his surroundings and he's fine; he gets his bottle and back off to sleep within a minute or two.
The confusing part for me is he is very aware my wife and I are in the room during these fits, when during a night terror they're supposedly in almost a trance-like state. The "waking up" motions he does is also baffling to me.
Thoughts?
One other possibility to consider: sleep apnea. Around age 2 or so, my daughter would wake up screaming in the middle of the night, and by my memory it seemed like she was crying so hard that she couldn’t catch her breath. Eventually we’d calm her down and she’d immediately go back to sleep. Later that year, we went on vacation and all slept in the same room, and her snoring was so loud. My 3 year old said he couldn’t sleep because she was so loud. And it definitely sounded constricted. So we knew we had to take her in. I’d had my tonsils and adenoids out as a kid so I wasn’t super surprised when the doc said that her tonsils were huge, and she had the surgery shortly after her 3rd birthday, after a sleep study that confirmed apnea. All of those scary wakeups stopped. She was also a less difficult toddler because she was sleeping better and generally happier. So if any of this sounds similar, definitely talk to the doc!