Hirp Terrors

A couple of months ago, after a knock down drag out fight between us and the Kyd over bedtime (you’d think that two parents against one six year old, the parents would have the edge, but Vegas must be familiar with how Rocky did against Drago, and called it even) we saw a glimpse of something, and hoped it was a one time occurrence. You know, like U2’s ZooTV record. After the wife and I finally won out, and the kyd finally drifted off to sleep, we were amazed/horrified/curious/and slightly damp from a (very small amount) of urine in our pants, when the kyd woke up screaming Bloody Mary. It seemed as if she was re-living the entire battle in her sleep, only it was very vocal and even violent.

She thrashed around her bed like Johnny Depp in the first Elm Street. Repeating her argument against the evil bedtime, as if we were still battling over that sacred time like WMD’s. We went and took her from her bed, out to the couch, in an attempt to wake her from what we could only imagine was a “night terror.” She had a gazed look in her eyes, and really wasn’t coherent. You never want to see your Kyd looking like Anna Nicole Smith. The next morning, she had no recollection of what went down the night before.

A few weeks later, again after a rough night, it all seemed to happen again. And again, no memory. All was quiet on the bedtime front, until Friday night. While Hirp was out playing cards (or having the Kyd’s birthday gift money extracted from his wallet as he likes to call it now) the Kyd went to sleep like an angel. I came home around midnight, and all was quiet. About 45 minutes later, she came walking out of her room. Only she wasn’t all there. When we spoke to her, she screamed and ran back into her room. It was happening again, and this time she had gone mobile. She screamed some, thrashed some, and suddenly she was fast asleep. Then, as the wife and I sat on the floor by her bed, she jerked once more and made some loud high pitched noises, causing the both of us to suffer small heart attacks. We’re doing fine, by the way. And then she was asleep again.

So then we’re talking about being afraid of what could happen, if she were out walking around in that state. Google wasn’t our friend, as we read a story about a father-in-law being attacked and his wife murdered, by their sleep walking son-in-law. He was acquitted (note to self). The following night was incident free. And then last night, or to be more accurate it was really early this morning, we had what appears to be incident #4.

The wife heard the Kyd cry out for her at about 5:30 (it isn’t that I don’t wake up for these things, but the wife has Superman like hearing, and springs from bed and into action in milli-seconds) She’s also an amazingly light sleeper, I can’t even fart in my sleep and get away with it. So she goes to the Kyd’s bedroom, finds the door halfway open (or halfway closed if you’re, well, me) and the TV is blaring SpongeBob. The remote is buried on her desk, so it’s not as if she just rolled over and the TV came on. And there were enough toys, including a dollhouse, directly in the path from her bed to where her TV sits, that it amazes us she was able to turn it on without tripping over anything. And she was dead to the world, fast asleep.

And I thought I’d be able to sleep a little bit, at least until she turned 12 or 13. I’ll have to find the alarm system that would alert me if she moves from her bed, a good 6 years before I wanted to. I’ll also have to start putting the knives away before going to sleep.