Thursday, January 20, 2011

Sleepwalker

Koy is a sleepwalker. It creeps me out. He has been doing it for a year or so, randomly, not every night but a couple times a month. He'll walk around, practice shooting hoops (just with his arms, no ball or anything) and he'll talk to us but you can tell he's asleep. Well the last 3 nights in a row he has been doing it! It really is starting to worry me! Tonight he came down with no pants on!! I did some research and found this...

*Why it happens
Experts don't know exactly what causes sleepwalking, although it does appear to run in families. Sleepwalking can start any time after your child begins walking or crawling, and at least 15 percent of all young children will have an episode at some point. It usually occurs within an hour or two of falling asleep, when your child is in the deepest part of nondreaming, or non-REM (rapid eye movement), sleep. Sleeping in strange places, a lack of sleep, or a high fever can trigger a sleepwalking episode.
A sleepwalking child appears to be wide awake, though he's actually not. His eyes will be open, and he may even carry on a conversation, although it probably won't make much sense. He may wander aimlessly around the house; common behaviors include falling asleep in a closet or mistaking one for the bathroom.

**What you can do
Don't try to wake your child. If he'll let you, gently guide him back to bed. Your child will have no memory of the event the next morning, so don't bring it up. Talking about it may make your toddler scared of bedtime. Before tucking him in for the night, be sure to pick up any toys or other objects that he could fall on during a middle-of-the-night walkabout, and put gates up at the head of the stairs. Most injuries to sleepwalking children happen when they fall out of a window or manage to get outside, so keep windows and doors locked, too.


This is so true to our case. It's always when we are still up, so within the first couple hours of him going to sleep. And just this past weekend we moved Jerzi up to share his room, and moved his bed to a different spot, so the strange places thing makes sense. I do worry about the window thing, with him being upstairs i wouldn't even hear him open a window up there.. guess we'll go buy locks for those. Problem is, he's old enough to unlock things. We heard him open the door to the garage one time.. kind of creepy. We always talk about it in the morning with him, he never remembers, he doesn't seem to be scared by it, but maybe we should stop bringing it up.. good advice in the article, i feel better that it's kind of normal.. Anyway, not going to lose sleep over it, we'll just be cautious and hopefully he snaps out of it!! Silly boy!

1 comments:

Sherice said...

Sorry about your sleepy~little walker. The window thing is a little worry~some... i love that he will be shooting hoops and stuff though, that's pretty cute.

p.s. does anybody blog anymore???? Am I just a non~facebooking loser?? Blogging is so much cooler:) I'm gonna bring it back!!