It breaks my heart to write about this because it is such a sensitive topic to Tyler. I believe it is tied to his inability to sleep through the night without tossing and turning. He sees sheep. He sees them when he goes into a dark room. He sees them when we enter a new environment. He sees them in the corner of the kitchen when he's eating at the dinner table. He sees them in the bathroom when I ask him to go potty without me. He sees them when he's shooting baskets in the front room. One minute he'll be totally fine, chewing his food or running down the hall or shooting baskets or whatever...then the next minute he whimpers "There's a sheep," and you can just hear the fear in his quivering voice as his breathing becomes more shallow and he does this nervous habit of rubbing his index fingers against his middle fingers.

I've tried everything I can think of, from talking to the sheep and pretending they were my friends, to telling him Chili won't let any sheep come in our home, to telling him sheep don't live in Elk Grove or on East Taron Drive (Tyler's very fascinated about where we live). Usually I can get him sidetracked but never permanently. Poor Tyler is so afraid of these sheep he sees. The bizarre thing is whenever we visit Gramma, she takes him down to see the sheep on her pasture and whenever we go to Fairytale Town we stop and visit Little Bo Peep's sheep. Tyler doesn't make any connection between these real sheep and the sheep he sees. He's had nightmares about them because he's woken up screaming about them but he has nightmares about alot of things so I don't know why the sheep are the ones tormenting him. It makes me so sad. Especially when I recall what I did last summer. Read my July 13 blog. It makes Daddy sad too. He confided to me that he blames himself for trying to teach Tyler how to count sheep to go back to sleep when he wakes up too early in the morning. Daddy said in hindsight it probably wasn't a good idea to tell Tyler that when he closes his eyes he can see sheep. We're such parents, taking on all the blame for our children's troubles.