At 8 1/2 months old my son woke me up one night by crawling on my head. There is nothing like waking up to a knee in your eye socket. When I lifted him off my face to see why he was doing such a thing I saw his eyes were shut tight, and he was in fact sleep crawling. I had never heard of this before. My husband is a sleep walker, so I've seen that plenty of times, but I had no idea an infant could sleep crawl.
This scared me. I was afraid of him potentially crawling off my bed head first in the middle of the night, but despite every attempt to get him to sleep on his own he just wouldn't do it. Besides this obvious worry I was nervous that this behavior was not 'normal'.
I turned to 'Google'- and new mom's best friend (and worst enemy, depending on the circumstances). Aside from one article that briefly mentioned sleep crawling, there was nothing but forum after forum of moms asking if their child's behavior was normal, if there was something they could do, and what the best way to protect their child from hurting themself during their sleep crawling might be.
At my sons 9 month appointment with his pediatrician I made sure to mention this new sleep pattern. I told Dr. A that Nathan had begun to sleep crawl and asked if this was okay. His reaction was anticlimactic: "He's dreaming just like you and I do." And that was it.
So, the reasoning behind my sons sleep crawling was that he was dreaming. That answered my 'why' but not the 'how do I protect him' or the 'will he grow out of this' questions.
As for his protection, I am a very light sleeper. I wake up in a heartbeat when anyone shifts in my bed- I have learned to function on very little sleep because of this. Since we are in the process of transitioning my son from our bed into his own crib, his crib has been outfitted with bumpers to keep him from banging his head into the bars like he has done before. The only other issue we have during these 'episodes' is that his arms or legs have been known to fly between the bars on his crib. The bumpers have helped keep this problem down to a minimum, but other than this I am at a loss as to what else I can do to keep this from happening. When he is in our bed, I 'put up' with his flaying and kicking, and on a positive note it has pushed me to transition him into his own crib faster.
The answer to the big question: will he grow out of this, is a big question mark. Research suggests that children that have one parent who sleep walks have a 45% chance of also sleep walking. If both sleep walk, the children have up to a 60% chance. I have never had an issue with this, but as I mentioned before, my husband has always had issues with sleep walking. I guess it is a relatively common occurrence for children, and occurrences peak between 4-8 years old, so I have years and years to look forward to dealing with this.
My son is just one of millions to that sleep crawls, so now I can rest assured that he is in fact 'normal'... At least as far as the sleep crawling is concerned.
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