Ay Mami!

Not much today. Just a couple of snaps from Venice Grind. I try to always keep it real with you guys but now that I have other people in my life, I tend to be selective about what I write when things are rough. And things are kind of rough right now. My life just feels completely out of balance after the past few months and especially last week — I am physically and emotionally exhausted from having to hold everyone down while they were sick — and I’m trying to get it back without destroying anything sacred.

I will delve into just one thing though.

Since we gave Hugga’s bubby to the Bubby Fairy a few weeks ago, her sleep has been a little restless. She’d wake up and cry for her bubby at least once a night, but I’d usually be able to rub her back and she’d fall right back to sleep.

On Saturday we made some bad decisions as parents. I let Hugga skip her nap and Huz had a friend over to watch the football game, and she just got really excitable and overstimulated right before bedtime. What ensued was the worst night I’d ever had as a parent.

We’d experienced a couple of legit night terrors before when Hugga was a baby. It is not a nightmare — the kid usually can’t remember what happened the next day, which is good — but it’s worse. Essentially what happens is that the kid sometimes sits up in bed or thrashes around, crying and screaming inconsolably. Her eyes might be open and she may appear to be awake, but she isn’t and she can’t see you or understand what is going on. And it isn’t merely just annoying to have a child screaming and thrashing in the middle of the night. Depending on how long it lasts, it can be physically and emotionally painful to see your child in such a state and not be able to do anything about it.

So imagine a night terror that lasts about an hour. And the more you tried to hold and console your baby, the longer and more violent the night terror became. Now imagine a night where this happens every two hours.

The worst thing about it was that, on top of already being physically exhausted from taking care of a sick household all goddamn week, Huz was out with his homies and I had to deal with the first one entirely on my own. I had literally never felt more desperate and alone in my life. He came home promptly when called to help deal with the rest of the night terrors, but it was something that I, personally could not bounce back from.

I tried getting Hugga back to normal the next day, setting her down for a three hour nap and then taking her to bed an hour earlier than usual, but she was still clearly exhausted from the night before and it only helped marginally. She had another night full of sleep terrors, only this time they were a little bit shorter than before, short enough for me to deal with sanely. I called the doctor yesterday but he had no helpful advice except to make sure that she was relaxed before bedtime. He said she’d eventually grow out of it. Great.

Tonight, after asking around for advice and doing extensive Google research, I pulled out all the stops. I got her ready for bed two hours earlier than usual. I set her up with some warm milk and we watched the most benign Tinkerbell movie in our collection and I snuggled with her with the lights low for a full hour. I even gave her the bubby back from Bubby Fairy, just to hold in her hand for comfort (I’d snipped the head off so she couldn’t put it back in her mouth).

She slept soundly until 1AM and I thought we were in the clear, but she did have one hiccup. I can’t tell if it was a night terror or a nightmare, though. It started off like a night terror, but she snapped out of it and actually remembered her dream. So we had to sleep with the lights on for the rest of the night.

I just want somebody to reassure me that things will go back to normal.

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