Joshua Zamrycki's Weblog

Before I talk about where I’ve been for the past three weeks, let me begin with where I am right now. I’m at home. Sitting at my desk. With my feet up. Well, with one foot up. My right foot. That’s the one that is currently bandaged and swollen after being sprained this past week playing volleyball. Meh.

It could have been worse. The last time this happened, I was wrapped in a cast and was forced to hobble around with crutches in excruciating pain for nearly two months. That sucked! No, this is what I have self-diagnosed as a minor sprain. I can’t exactly walk on it but, knowing from personal experience what a bad sprain feels like, I’d say I’ll be out of action for a week to ten days. What a good excuse to work from home!

This will be a welcome change of pace, to tell you the truth. Life has been buzzing by in overdrive recently (hence the lack of recent blog entries). First my dad came to visit and stayed with us for two weeks. I finished recording voices for a long-running cartoon series. I started voicing a new cartoon series. I helped write the scripts for and acted in a series of short marketing videos for HP. I was on Catalan TV. And I had a week consisting of intensive 10-hour meetings everyday with our worldwide HP large format marketing department to plan the communications strategy for the upcoming year. Oh, and I also had a family to take care of. Maybe I’ll write about some of these things in more detail in the days to come. But just look at how absolutely insane life was for a while there:

Less than 3% of children experience true night terrors. Why must Emily continue to demonstrate how exceptional she is?

Perform a search for “child night terror” and, after reading the entirety of the first 10 search results, you will come to believe that a night terror is a sleep disorder, usually occurring in children aged 3 to 12 years, characterized by periods of extreme agitation with manifestations of intense fear, crying, and screaming in the middle of the night. Though still asleep, the child will sit up bolt upright in bed, with their eyes wide open, and scream. These episodes may last anywhere from 1 to 40 minutes and the child rarely remember any of the events of the episode after it has passed.

Now allow me to describe for you how our personal experience has differed from the clinical descriptions that we’ve read.

On almost any given night for the past couple of months, sometime between 11pm and 3am, Emily will wake up shouting bloody nonsense from her bed. If we’re lucky, she’ll settle down and fall back asleep in a minute or two. Just as likely, though, she’ll get out of bed and roam the house looking for something/someone to shout at. If this happens, we’re doomed. She’ll come into our room, disoriented and screaming, and we’ll try to escort her out so as not to wake up Sebastian. This just makes her even more upset and then the fireworks really kick off. If we try to speak to her to calm her down, she screams over us and tries to hit us. If we try to touch her or hold her, she runs away and hides in a remote corner of the room like a feral child. Then she tries to hit us again. Then she spits and hisses at us. All the while, shouting at the top of her little lungs, which all of a sudden don’t seem so little. The poor thing has no idea what’s going on. It’s a violent and scary episode which can last upwards of an hour! It’s hard not to try to interact with her but the experts assure us that there’s nothing we can do except make sure that she doesn’t hurt herself.

But the most incredible part of this intense and traumatic experience (for us) is when, after the terror has apparently run its course, she simply snaps out of it (wakes up), looks at me, and says something like, “would you like to play with the blocks and build a tower with me, daddy?” in the sweetest little voice imaginable. She does not remember very much, if anything, from the terror.

So I’m thinking my kid is seriously messed up, emotionally scarred, or, at best, possessed. But before flipping through the Yellow Pages in search of an exorcist, we thought we’d ask around to see if any other parents had been through anything similar. I was so relieved to find out that most of people we asked had experienced similar episodes – of varying degrees. Emily appears to have much more intense terrors than most but they seem to have settled down (a bit) over the past two weeks. I hope this is just a phase and that it comes to an end sooner than later – for her, for Sebastian, for us, and for our poor poor neighbors.

Sebastian just made it up his first set of stairs. One full flight from our fifth floor to the top of our building. There’s no stopping him now. My dad (who’s visiting us at the moment) is convinced our little rug rat will be walking before he heads back to Florida in two weeks. I won’t bet against him.

And here’s a video of Emily singing along with her favorite song from The Lion King while mattress bouncing.