Funny Face

I am feeling just awful for Tate. As I have mentioned before, he has nightmares...almost nightly. He has always said, "a tiger is eating me!" or "a cheetah is eating me!", but that's pretty much what his nightmares are about. We stopped showing him the movie Kung Fu Panda (even though he loves it!) because we think that's when the nightmares started and they seemed to have slowed down since we stopped watching that. This morning at 5a.m. he woke up saying, "there's a funny face in my room! He pushed me down! He cut me!" He would not go back to sleep after that...he was too scared. We have NO IDEA what he's referring to, but he has been OBSESSED with this "funny face" all day. He would peek down the hall towards his bedroom, but wouldn't go down the hall without us and then he asked us to go to his room and find the "funny face". We would tell him that there was no "funny face" in there and so all day he kept saying, "see, there's no funny face in my room Mommy." But he couldn't stop talking about it. We would try to avoid the topic and just change the subject so he would forget about it, but he won't. He is scared. It is so sad! He took a 5 hour nap in our bed today. He was exausted, but not scared. Then at bedtime he didn't want to sleep in his room because of the "funny face". We assured him there was no "funny face" in there and made him go to bed in his room. He just kept repeating over and over and over, "there's no funny face. there's no funny face. there's no funny face." My heart is breaking for him!

We looked online about nightmares in toddlers and found some information that indicated that they will occur when toddlers are being taught new things or are experiencing stress causing changes. For example, potty training or parents pressuring them to change behaviors or learn something new. This would actually fit some things that have been going on lately. Tate is being more defiant these days and we are really cracking down on making him "listen". More time outs have been given and we feel as though in the past we may have been too lax and now we're trying to correct that. In addition to that, we have been attempting potty training, however we've decided to stop that for a couple of weeks. Also, we have been concerned lately that Tate is color blind. Not that there's a whole lot that can be done about that, but we would just like to know. He knows his colors really well, but always seems to get red and green mixed up. He can't tell them apart, which is apparently the colors that people who are color blind tend to have problems with. When we hold up something red and ask, "what color is this?" He says, "green". So we've been working on his colors A LOT lately. Apparently doing all of these things at once where he feels pressure can cause a stress that causes nightmares. We read that this is the age when nightmares start to occur because when a toddler turns 3 is typically a common time where lots of changes occur...potty training, learning a lot of new things, preschool, ect.

Anyway, I have no idea what to do to stop the nightmares. As I said, we are putting potty training on hold for a few weeks, so maybe that will help. We will not be putting our attempt to making him a better listener on hold though! This is necessary! I don't know. He has been so scared about the "funny face" all day and I just feel so bad for him. I hate to know that he's in his room scared. :(