That is the question that I often find myself asking whenever one of my children gets sick. You’d think that I’d be used to it by now, considering that I have two, but alas, no.  It just never gets easier…

Last night left us particularly shaken.  My two year old daughter started showing signs of a cold and was running a low-grade fever.  After her usual pre-bedtime ritual: warm sippy cup of milk, bedtime story & cuddles, we gave her some Tempra and tucked her in.  What’s a little fever, right?  It’s the body’s natural response to infection.

Well, at 12:51 am to be precise, she let out a blood-curdling scream that had us darting into her room to see what was the matter.  She continued to scream and point, saying that there were animals under her bed.  My husband tried to show her that there was nothing there, but she became even more hysterical.  Her eyes were now fixed on the edge of her bed and were glazed over, almost in possessed-like state. She then shouted “there’s a cat on my bed.”  What followed was even odder.  She began to roar.  “What are you doing?,” we asked. She told us that she was a lion and she was going to scare the cat away.

The strange part is that she was totally lucid and we were able to carry on a conversation with her throughout this episode.  So we ruled out [tag]night terrors[/tag].  So what could it be?  A [tag]bad dream[/tag]?  Hallucinations? But no, the fever was too low for that. We really couldn’t be sure.  All we knew is that she was in a state of total fear and we had to calm her down. She asked to come into our bed for cuddles. She can be a bit of a con-artist when it comes to finding her way into our room, but on this occasion, I doubted it highly and deemed the request to be genuine.  So she came to cuddle with me in our bed, while my husband’s 6 ft. plus frame headed to her room to try to cram its way into her twin canopy bed, complete with ladybug sheets and enough stuffed animals per square inch to fill a Gund factory. I know, this is no time for laughs, but I couldn’t resist.

She stayed with me for the rest of the night, waking 2 more times, shaking me to say “Mama, there’s animals on my pillow.”  “No, sweetie,” I said, “it’s just wrinkles in the material.”  An hour later, “Mama, there’s a cat on the dresser.” “No sweetie, it’s just shadows being cast by the moonlight.”  Finally, she fell into a deep sleep and slept in till 8:45 am.  The crazy part in all of this… This morning, she awoke as though nothing had happened.  No real recollection of anything, just complaining that she was tired. 

So what the heck was it? The question still has me stumped. All I know is that, as parents, we have to be great actors.  We have to show no fear when we’re scared as hell.  We have to be pillars of strength when we often feel at our weakest.  And we have to be wide-eyed and bushy-tailed when the rest of the world is fast asleep.  So, does it ever get easier?  I’ll let you know in the years to come.  Till then, I will wear my bravest face and save my little lion from the beasts that roam the jungle, or in this case, the animals under her bed.   

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