Too Full for Nightmares

We've been reading to John each night before he goes to bed. It started out with The Cat in the Hat and then The Cat in the Hat Comes Back was added. Soon it was a different picture book here and there, lately it's been One Duck Stuck and now it's a chapter of The Trumpet of the Swan each night too. As you can imagine this takes quite some time to read all of these each night and so a few nights ago when John was goofing around and bedtime got started late cause it was just too much fun to watch him be so silly, we skipped the read alouds, said prayers and he went to sleep. That night he woke up 4 times with nightmares, tossing and hollering and the next morning he told me it was nightmares about the hospital stuff, of course, and some other stuff too. The next night we went back to reading and although he still woke up at 3am, he was calm and there were no nightmares.

I got to thinking about this and I have been having nightmares all along about everything from stuff I've seen happen to John, or I'm afraid will happen to him, to my own inadequacies as a parent, etc., but I noticed too that the more I read through the day the fewer nightmares I have too. So I've been picking up books and reading and each day I find that my own head is getting a little clearer and my nights are a little more restful. At the moment I am reading the Book of Concord with a bunch of ladies on Facebook, and I just finished The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society which was very good and now I am scanning the shelves for what to read next. I have books coming in from CPH that I want to read and a slew of them on reserve at the Library, I can't decide if I should reattempt Don Quixote for the third time (I've not succeeded to finish it yet) or something else, but I am sure that we will read to John before he goes to bed and after Mark and I pray the litany together tonight there will be some book to fall asleep too for me to and hopefully a night without nightmares for both John and I, a night when we have stuffed our heads too full to give the nightmares room.