Nightmares :(

Wednesday night Clara had her first major nightmare. I'm sure she's had small ones because they are common at this age, but most kids barely wake up and fall asleep again and it's all gone. Around 11pm on Wednesday Clara woke up SCREAMING, and I ran upstairs to find her sitting on her headboard clutching the railing yelling at me to help her because the bugs were going to get her. It was heart breaking. I picked her up and and spoke quietly to her until she could calm down enough to tell me what happened. She said her bed was full of ladybugs and that there was a big spider on the chair that wanted to get her. I showed her there were NO bugs, and that helped a little bit but every time she closed her eyes she would start screaming about the bugs again. I finally took her downstairs into our room hoping there would be no "bugs" there, although I knew sleep would be hard to come by because Clara does NOT share a bed very well at all. No luck. She was still so scared and just couldn't bring herself to calm down long enough to fall asleep again. She'd get close and almost doze off just to startle herself awake terrified of bugs again. I finally thought that maybe her dry skin (she has pretty bad excema) might be causing part of the problem so we covered her in lotion which seemed to help a little bit, but not for long. We finally wrapped her up in a blanket, tucked her under Daddy's arm and turned on a Daniel Tiger episode on Mommy's phone so that maybe she would be distracted enough to finally fall asleep, which finally did the trick. We were up from 11pm-4am trying to figure out what in the world to do. And then Emma woke up a little before 6. I got up with Emma and let Bryan and Clara sleep for a little while since Bryan had to go to work and sent out an SOS to my Mom letting her know we had a horrible night and that I might could use some help.

Emma making a mess of her books

Riding her elephant

 Bryan woke up around 9:30 and he joined me and Emma until Clara woke up, and then I left him to it until my Mom got there and I went back to bed. I am a GROUCH with less than an hour and a half of sleep.

Mom is my hero! 

Then I called the doctor to get Clara in because her ears seemed to be bothering her and obviously her skin needed to be looked at if it was waking her up at night. Turns out she has a double ear infection, a sore throat and a bad excema flair up. We got the antibiotics for her ears, and then a stronger prescription for her skin plus a referral to a child dermatologist (I was even able to get in next Wednesday!)

Then we went over to Lulu and Papa's house to play (but not swim :( not until Clara had at least 12 hrs worth of antibiotics) until Daddy got off of work.

Being silly with Papa

Coloring a pretty picture

We prayed that night that Clara would not have any more nightmares, but no such luck. We were up most of Thursday night with Clara again.