Last night, after all the Easter festivities had died down and the kids were in their beds, I settled down to do some writing on the laptop in my bedroom. I have a chair set up there, so I can sit by the window and write in relative solitude. Not more than ten minutes later, my five-year old showed up at my door, breathing hard.<\/p>\n
“Did you have a nightmare?” I asked.<\/p>\n
He nodded.<\/p>\n
“Okay,”\u00a0I gestured to my bed. “Go ahead and climb up.”<\/p>\n
His older brother showed up just as the little guy was settling in. “Hey,” he said “Where’s -”<\/p>\n
“Shh,” I interrupted. “He’s in the bed. You can climb in, too. Just be quiet.”<\/p>\n
I turned off all the lights, and they quickly fell fast asleep.<\/p>\n
It was nice working there in the darkness to the sound of the little guys’ breathing, but eventually it was time for us to go to bed. I shut down my computer and carefully lifted the little guy up and held him to my shoulder.<\/p>\n
As I was carrying him out of the room, he suddenly started to shout.\u00a0 “AAAHH! Stop! Stop!”<\/p>\n
I stopped and looked for what could be going wrong. Was I pinching him, or was his foot turned wrong or something? I shifted his weight, then held him away from my body so I could make sure.<\/p>\n
“AAAH” he continued, whipping his head back and forth. His whole body was rigid, his eyes closed tight.<\/p>\n
“Stop! Stop!”<\/p>\n
Panicked, I lowered him to the floor. As soon as he was horizontal again, he relaxed and stopped shouting, fast asleep on the wooden floor.<\/p>\n
I checked him to make sure he was completely out. then picked him up again and ran to his bedroom before he could start screaming again.<\/p>\n
Phew.<\/p>\n
Talk about a nightmare!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nightmares are typically more scary for the people having them than they are for the people around them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-n"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-cb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}