Mothering Moments: Avoiding Night Terrors

If you, as the mother, have an overactive imagination, then chances are, your darling daughter has inherited that same trait. And along with it, your love for books, particularly those that involve the supernatural. So your current research project on local ghost stories will not go unnoticed. As you are reading through a website that details several of these local alleged hauntings in places where your daughter has visited before, you might not object when she snuggles up and reads with you. However, as soon as her father mentions bedtime approaching, you might suddenly remember that your darling daughter is a lot like you, and therefore frequently has nightmares inspired by the scary stuff in books, or things from school…or websites about ghosts. Now you're starting to feel foolish, like that time when you were a teenager babysitting a five-year-old and you let her watch "The Howling" with you. That didn't have a positive outcome.

So you open a new tab and do a quick search for "cute hamster pictures." After giggling over a few sites, you even click over to LOL cats and snort chuckle over more silly animals. Then she happily skips off to bed.

The next morning, when she tells you about the weird dream she had where ghost hamsters kept trying to climb the ladder into her bed, then you have only yourself to blame.