Goes off to sleep fine then wakes and screams the house down........

[nobodysfool]

My ds is nearly three and has always been a great sleeper.
For the last four nights i have been putting him to bed at the normal time,he gets in his bed happily,all smiles and yawns,then after roughly an hour later (one night only 15 mins)he wakes up crying his eyes out really distressed.He will continue to cry for up to an hour.
He is usually such a cheeful little boy and has no problems re settling himself in the night if he wakes.
He is prone to ear infections-getting the doc to check tom-but he usually kicks off when i try and put him in bed if there is an infection-not after an hour of being asleep.
He wont tell me if he is hurting or having nightmares.
Any ideas.

First you need to rule out any medical issues like his ears - he might be waking in pain, but as you say it is a bit strange that he goes down just find. A friend of mines DD had similar. She eventually found out that she as having bad dreams or as she calls it night terrors. When she went in to console her it was as if she was still in the dream and sometimes wasn't even aware that her Mum was there. She kept the lights off - spoke very gently and just held her until she eventually stopped crying and went off again. In the morning she didn't remember a thing about it. They became less and less and eventually she grew out of them at about 4.

Have had similar experiences with dd, now 5, which we think were night terrors as she did not seem to realise that we were even there. As NooBee mentioned, all we could do was sit and talk quietly to her and hold her when she let us, and wait for it to stop. There seemed to suddenly come a point where she would calm down enough to have a drink and then would fall straight back to sleep. Sorry cannot offer any useful advice, I know that it is awful to hear your child scream for so long and not to be able to do anything effective to comfort them. DD used to have several a week but they have become far less frequent over the last year and she hasn't had any for several months now, touch wood. Hope things improve for you.

Thanks for your advice.
Went to the doctors and there is no ear infection or anything else obvious.
Is there anything else i should know about night terrors?
All he keeps screaming is "go downstairs,i want to go downstairs,please".Then when he is calmer and try and get in back to bed he sobs " no bed,no bed".
I just feel so useless.
If i just spoke to him when he is screamig he just screams more and i have even tried ignoring him-made me feel sick-but he just got more and more distressed.

My dd is just like this.she is 3 years old and has night terrors...I justb hold her and cuddle her until it passes because i think she is not aware that i am there and i don't want to wake her and give her a fright....

I've never read anything useful about night terrors, the only times I found it actually mentioned in books it said that they only happened to a child once! We tried the ignoring thing, going out of the room and leaving her for one or two minutes (felt like hours) but it had no affect and in the end we found that the best thing was just to sit and talk to her as normally as possible. Keep telling her (and yourself) that everything is ok. We use to tell dd that she was in her bedroom, mum and dad were there and she was safe. Often she wouldn't even let me hug her and any attempt would elicit a high pitched scream and she would start shouting for her mum which was awful, she clearly had no idea I was there. Dd started having them at 6 months and they gradually became less frequent and she would calm down much quicker. If he is saying he wants to go downstairs then personally I would take him down and see if it does work. Once he has calmed down he will probably either fall back to sleep and you can carry him up, or he will 'wake up' properly and you can put him to bed as usual with a story or something. IME though, if they are night terrors taking him downstairs probably won't make any difference to how long it takes him to calm down, but it's definitely worth a try. Hope tonight is better for you.

Thanks all for your advice.
While ds was having a wee this afternoon he started crying and saying it was hurting-back to the doctors and he has a water infection!
Let's hope that it was the pain of weeing in the night that was waking him in the night and he didn't know why he was awake and in pain.
Poor little sod.More antibiotics and cream for the end of his willy as that looks sore now.
Ho Hum the joys of kids eh?