A mom has described the moment she woke in the middle of the night to find her two-year-old daughter missing from her bed.
When she returned to her room to continue her search, things got even more confusing for the mother from Georgia, leading to the most unexpected of discoveries.
As many parents of young children know, bedtime does not necessarily bring with it a restful night of sleep. A 2012 study in the journal Pediatrics saw 359 mother and child pairs take part in a unique sleep study. The mothers were asked to complete sleep questionnaires when their children were 6, 12, 24 and 36 months old.
The results revealed around 10 percent of children had a sleep problem at some point during this early phase of childhood. Lauren Remillard didn't necessarily think her daughter Gentry was part of that minority, until an unusual incident late one night last month. Remillard told Newsweek: "I got up around 1 a.m. to use the restroom, and when I came back to our bedroom, I saw that our TV was on—as well as every light in our room."
Gentry, however, was nowhere to be seen. Figuring she had woken up and was "playing a prank" Remillard got her phone out to record, under the belief her daughter was about to surprise her.
Gentry certainly ended up surprising her mom, but not in the way Remillard expected. After several minutes of waiting for her daughter to emerge from her hiding place, Remillard decided to go searching around for the toddler.
That was when she found her. "She was asleep under the bed hugging a Christmas tree ornament," Remillard said. The discovery was captured in a video posted to TikTok under the handle @lauren_remillard. "I woke her up and she had no idea that she had done any of it," Remillard said. "That was when I figured out that she had learned to sleepwalk."
A Stanford University School of Medicine study previously put the proportion of U.S. adults who sleepwalk at around 3.6 percent. Gentry's sleepwalking wasn't a massive shock to her mom, though. "I've had a history of sleepwalking in the past and so has my dad," Remillard said.
On that occasion she was simply "relieved" to find her daughter. She's since confirmed that steps have been taken to ensure they avoid a repeat. "We've now installed alarms on every door in the house that will alert us if anyone comes in or out and we will have her sleeping close to us for a while to see if it was a one-time event or if it's something she will repeatedly do," Remillard said. "It was funny this one time. But we know that sleepwalking can be a serious thing, so we are taking steps to keep her protected."
English (US) ·